About This Book
2020 Book of the Year and General Fiction Christy Award Winner
2020 Inspy Award Winner for Debut Novel
“This is the book everyone will talk about all year–lyrical, lovely, full of heart and heartache, secrets kept and revealed. These characters, this town, and their stories will seep into your soul and leave you wanting more. A novel of hope and reconciliation you won’t forget for a long time, probably not forever.” –Sarah Sundin, Best-selling and Award-winning author of The Sky Above Us and The Sea Before Us
“Family members reconnect over an incomplete WWII memorial in Dykes’ tender debut. . . . With its believable characters and narrative of atonement, Dykes’s impressive debut will appeal to fans of Sarah Sundin or Kate Breslin.”–Publishers Weekly
In the wake of WWII, a grieving fisherman submits a poem to a local newspaper: a rallying cry for hope, purpose . . . and rocks. Its message? Send me a rock for the person you lost, and I will build something life-giving. When the poem spreads farther than he ever intended, Robert Bliss’s humble words change the tide of a nation. Boxes of rocks inundate the harbor village on the coast of Maine, and he sets his callused hands to work.
Decades later, Annie Bliss is summoned back to Ansel-by-the-Sea when GrandBob, the man who gave her refuge during the hardest summer of her youth, is the one in need of help. But what greets her is a mystery: a wall of heavy boxes hiding in his home. Memories of stone ruins on a nearby island ignite a fire in her anthropologist soul to uncover answers.
Together with the handsome and enigmatic town postman, Annie uncovers the story layer by layer, yearning to resurrect the hope GrandBob once held so dear and to know the truth behind the chasm in her family’s past. But mending what has been broken for so long may require more of her and those she loves than they are prepared to give.
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In this pocket of a harbor where splintered lives, like waves upon the shore, are gathered up and held close . . . I never imagined that it would be my breaking place, too.
Nor how beautiful the breaking could be.