Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place is not considered controversial by today’s standards. But it was a contentious and highly debated novel when it appeared in 1956. It remains a literary phenomenon that exposes the dark, sordid secrets hidden beneath the respectable facade of a conservative New England mill town. Various movie and TV versions of the […]
In Anita Shreve’s 2017 historical novel, The Stars are Fire, Grace Holland is a young, pregnant homemaker living a stifling existence in a passionless marriage to her surveyor husband, Gene. Set on the coast of Maine in 1947, the narrative centers on Grace’s transformation from a subservient wife to an independent, self-reliant woman in the
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In the 2014 novel A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline, a middle-aged Christina Olson reflects on her life at her remote Maine farmhouse, which is both her sanctuary and prison. Suffering from an undiagnosed degenerative nerve disease, she finds purpose and an unexpected, enduring artistic legacy when she meets a young Andrew
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Set in remote Vermont, Howard Frank Mosher’s 2014 novel Northern Borders is a poignant, humorous coming-of-age novel. In 1948, six-year-old Austen Kittredge is sent to live on his grandparents’ hardscrabble hill farm in the wilderness of Lost Nation Hollow. There, he undergoes a remarkable education, spending his next twelve formative years coming of age. Austen’s
Beatriz Williams‘s The Beach at Summerly is a sweeping historical fiction and espionage novel, written in 2023 and set on the fictional Winthrop Island off the New England coast. Told across alternating timelines in 1946 and 1954, it follows the gripping story of Emilia Winthrop as she navigates class divides, dangerous Cold War secrets, and
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John Irving’s 16th novel, Queen Esther (2025), is a multi-generational, historical saga that marks a triumphant return to the orphanage setting of The Cider House Rules. The narrative follows Esther Nacht, a Viennese-born Jewish orphan whose life is profoundly shaped by antisemitism and a fierce commitment to her namesake—the biblical Queen Esther—who protected her people.
This is a memorable story that can, at times, be dirty, sappy, and heavily nostalgic. It also paints a fascinating picture of the New England home-front in the war-ravaged year 1942. One could also argue about whether this quasi-novel belongs on our list of New England based novels, because it’s based on the semi-autobiographical screenplay
A Separate Peace by John Knowles is a great example of a New England prep school story. It’s a coming-of-age novel set against the backdrop of the early 1940s at the Devon School, an all-boys boarding school in New England, while World War II rages abroad. The story is narrated by Gene Forrester, who returns
