Gail Godwin. (2017). Grief Cottage: A Novel. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Gail Godwin. 2017. Grief Cottage: A Novel. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Gail Godwin, Grief Cottage: A Novel. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

Gail Godwin. Grief Cottage: A Novel. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

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   • fileAs: Godwin, Gail
   • bioText: Gail Godwin is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the bestselling author of twelve critically acclaimed novels, including Violet Clay, Father Melancholy's Daughter, Evensong, The Good Husband and Evenings at Five. She is also the author of The Making of a Writer, her journal in two volumes (ed. Rob Neufeld). She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants for both fiction and libretto writing, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Gail Godwin lives in Woodstock, New York.
     Visit her website at www.gailgodwin.com
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fullDescription

Longlisted for the 2020 Grand Prix de littérature américaine
Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2017 (Top 10)
Chicago Public Library Best of the Best Books 2017
Indie Next Summer 2018 Pick For Reading Groups

The haunting tale of a desolate cottage, and the hair-thin junction between this life and the next, from bestselling National Book Award finalist Gail Godwin.
After his mother's death, eleven-year-old Marcus is sent to live on a small South Carolina island with his great aunt, a reclusive painter with a haunted past. Aunt Charlotte, otherwise a woman of few words, points out a ruined cottage, telling Marcus she had visited it regularly after she'd moved there thirty years ago because it matched the ruin of her own life. Eventually she was inspired to take up painting so she could capture its utter desolation.
The islanders call it "Grief Cottage," because a boy and his parents disappeared from it during a hurricane fifty years before. Their bodies were never found and the cottage has stood empty ever since. During his lonely hours while Aunt Charlotte is in her studio painting and keeping her demons at bay, Marcus visits the cottage daily, building up his courage by coming ever closer, even after the ghost of the boy who died seems to reveal himself. Full of curiosity and open to the unfamiliar and uncanny given the recent upending of his life, he courts the ghost boy, never certain whether the ghost is friendly or follows some sinister agenda.

Grief Cottage is the best sort of ghost story, but it is far more than that—an investigation of grief, remorse, and the memories that haunt us. The power and beauty of this artful novel wash over the reader like the waves on a South Carolina beach.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: New York Times
   • content: [Godwin] remains a forensically skillful examiner of her characters' motives, thoughts and behavior. Grief Cottage revisits some of her favorite themes—fractured families, parentless children, the initial shock and long-term repercussions of death and disappearance, how the future can run off course in a flash—to make the very good point that it doesn't require a ghost to haunt a life . . . Deeply satisfying.
2. • premium: False
   • source: Washington Post
   • content: Godwin may flirt with the magical, but she deals firmly with the realism of depression and loss. It's those psychological ghosts that Grief Cottage is really about.
3. • premium: False
   • source: The Economist
   • content: Compelling . . . an ambiguous, beguiling tale in which the presence of the supernatural is entangled with—and perhaps precipitated by—characters who are undergoing an emotional crisis.
4. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly, "Best Books of 2017"
   • content: Godwin's forceful prose captivates with the quiet, renewing power of a persistent tide.
5. • premium: False
   • source: Shelf Awareness
   • content: An exquisite narrative . . . This grace-filled story probes aspects of life and death, isolation and family, and how great pain and loss can ultimately lead to unforeseen transcendence.
6. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: Marcus' fascination with the ghostly presence of an adolescent boy, thought to have perished at Grief Cottage in a hurricane, allows Godwin to explore themes of loss, connection, and growth unfettered by the corporeal world.
7. • premium: False
   • source: Washington Independent Review of Books
   • content: Grief Cottage is an absorbing and wise novel. Gail Godwin convincingly expands the meanings of haunting well beyond the appearance of the ghost-boy who triggers Marcus Harshaw's uncanny—and canny—journey of self-discovery.
8. • premium: False
   • source: Charleston Post & Courrier
   • content: A compelling story of family and loss. Godwin's vivid prose, well-wrought characters and captivating plot will keep readers turning pages to the end.
9. • premium: False
   • source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
   • content: Godwin again works her magic in a novel at once uplifting and somber. An author whose skills have entranced readers for 45 years, Godwin will turn 80 this month. But do not fret over a mere number, one which has in no way diminished her power to appeal to the intellectual and emotional sides of human existence . . . Grief Cottage melds literary and popular fiction, glows with Godwin's heart and humanity and reflects the wisdom of her years.
10. • premium: False
    • source: Raleigh News & Observer
    • content: [Godwin] knows how to make the atmosphere tense and make your skin tingle. At 80, the author, who grew up in Asheville and graduated from UNC, is returning to long-favorite themes: longings and loss, motherless children and the repercussions of death . . . Grief Cottage is not the fluffy stuff of many a summer beach read, but it's well worth a place in your beach bag this summer.
11. • premium: False
    • source: Minneapolis Star Tribune
    • content: Gail Godwin peers into the souls of her characters to find the healing nature of kindness, tolerance and love.
12. • premium: False
    • source: Atlanta Journal Constitution
    • content: Godwin, a three-time National Book Award finalist, mixes horror and mystery tropes with literary mu
13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from April 24, 2017
      A young boy obsessed with a haunted beach shack searches for meaning amid catastrophic loss in National Book Award–finalist Godwin’s (Flora) chilling novel. After Marcus’s mother dies, the 11-year-old leaves with his great-aunt Charlotte to live on a small South Carolina island. Marcus receives little comfort from the laconic, reclusive painter, but falls easily into an unexpected role as her caretaker and companion. Analytical beyond his years but lacking an adult’s skepticism, Marcus becomes entranced by the ramshackle cottage that Charlotte has painted for countless commissions over the years. After being told a family had disappeared there 50 years earlier, Marcus seeks answers long buried by time. The book moves between the fantastical and the everyday with ease; Marcus is just as likely to shop for his elderly neighbors as to whisper encouragement to loggerhead hatchlings or offer friendship to the restless spirits of the island. But nothing and no one on the island can break free of the forces that build and destroy, that give life and bring death. As time pushes him forward, Marcus must decide how to grieve: to raze his identity completely or memorialize his tragedies. His choice and its consequences will echo with readers, and Godwin’s forceful prose captivates with the quiet, renewing power of a persistent tide. Agent: Moses Cardona, John Hawkins and Associates.

14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      April 1, 2017
      Spirits of all types haunt characters in Godwin's latest examination of grief and loss.Cast adrift after the death of his devoted single mother--who had not yet revealed the identity of his father--preternaturally self-aware 11-year-old Marcus finds himself in the care of his enigmatic great-aunt, Charlotte, a reclusive painter and inhabitant of a coastal South Carolina island. With an entire summer to adjust to life in his new situation before school starts, Marcus endeavors to make sense of his present surroundings as well as his past. His attentions focus on Grief Cottage (the site of a local tragedy) and the caretaking efforts undertaken each year by island residents to ensure the safe passage of hatching sea turtles as they journey to the ocean. Marcus' fascination with the ghostly presence of an adolescent boy, thought to have perished at Grief Cottage in a hurricane, allows Godwin (Publishing: A Writer's Memoir, 2015, etc.) to explore themes of loss, connection, and growth unfettered by the corporeal world. A cast of island denizens and old friends aids Marcus in his quest to understand his place in the world and illustrates the concept of family as he searches for the reality of it. Readers willing to suspend disbelief in the paranormal occurrences facing the pubescent Marcus may still struggle with the unusually high levels of awareness--of self and others--in his narration, relatively rare traits in a character his age. Echoes of the mysterious isolation in Marcus' family's past sound throughout the novel, suggesting that home and family may best be experienced as we create them, not as we expect them. Godwin approaches many of her usual melancholic themes from a different angle and raises the question of whether we get what we want or we get what we need.

      COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from May 1, 2017
      Critically acclaimed and best-selling Godwin follows Flora (2013) with another involving tale about a displaced child of the South, this time bringing her signature psychological and social acuity to an intricately revealing ghost story. Orphaned at 11, Marcus is delivered to his only living relative, his great-aunt Charlotte, whom he has never met. Artist Charlotte has long lived in solitude on a South Carolina island, supporting herself by selling her moody paintings of the seashore, especially of the so-called Grief Cottage, an evocative ruin. Over this disorienting summer, Marcus becomes obsessed with the tragic story of the boy who lived in the cottage with his parents 50 years ago until they all disappeared in a hurricane. As flinty Charlotte wrestles with newly rekindled and traumatizing memories, her drinking problem worsens. Harboring his own dark secrets and worries, smart and sensitive Marcus helps guard a nest of endangered sea-turtle eggs and visits Grief Cottage to commune, even as he fears for his sanity, with the ghost of the lost boy. With intriguingly eccentric supporting characters and a dramatic setting, Godwin's riveting and wise story of the slow coalescence of trust and love between a stoic artist and a grieving boy, and of nature's glory and indifference, subtly and insightfully explores different forms of haunting and vulnerability, strength and survival.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Word will spread quickly about Godwin's tender and spellbinding supernatural novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

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Longlisted for the 2020 Grand Prix de littérature américaine
Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2017 (Top 10)
Chicago Public Library Best of the Best Books 2017
Indie Next Summer 2018 Pick For Reading Groups

The haunting tale of a desolate cottage, and the hair-thin junction between this life and the next, from bestselling National Book Award finalist Gail Godwin.
After his mother's death, eleven-year-old Marcus is sent to live on a small South Carolina island with his great aunt, a reclusive painter with a haunted past. Aunt Charlotte, otherwise a woman of few words, points out a ruined cottage, telling Marcus she had visited it regularly after she'd moved there thirty years ago because it matched the ruin of her own life. Eventually she was inspired to take up painting so she could capture its utter desolation.
The islanders call it "Grief Cottage," because a boy and his parents...

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