To the New Owners: A Martha's Vineyard Memoir

Madeleine Blais

jul 2017. · Atlantic Monthly Press

O ovoj e-knjizi

The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist “gives a familial face to the mystique of Martha’s Vineyard” in a memoir with “gentle humor and . . . elegiac sweetness” (Kirkus Reviews).
 
A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist
 
In the 1970s, Madeleine Blais’s in-laws purchased a vacation house on Martha’s Vineyard. A little more than two miles down a dirt road, it had no electricity or modern plumbing, the roof leaked, and mice had invaded the walls. It was perfect.
 
Sitting on Tisbury Great Pond—well-stocked with delicious oysters and crab—the house faced the ocean and the sky. Though improvements were made, the ethos remained the same: no heat, television, or telephone. Instead, there were countless hours at the beach, meals cooked and savored with friends, nights talking under the stars, until, in 2014, the house was sold.
 
To the New Owners is Madeleine Blais’s “witty and charming . . . deeply felt memoir” of this house, and of the Vineyard itself, from the history of the island and its famous visitors, to the ferry, the pie shops, the quirky charms and customs, and the abundant natural beauty. But more than that, this is an elegy for a special place—a retreat that held the intimate history of her family (The National Book Review).
 

O autoru

Madeleine Blais is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author. She has written for the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, and Chicago Tribune, among other publications, and is a faculty member of the School of Journalism at the University of Massachusetts. Her book In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle was a national bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. She is also the author of Uphill Walkers and The Heart Is an Instrument. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.