The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay
“Every now and then—maybe two or three times in a decade—a book comes along that’s so good you want to buttonhole strangers on the street, show it to them, and say: ‘Read this! It will fill you up and make you glad you’re alive!’ The late Beverly Jensen’s The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay is exactly that kind of book. It roars from hilarity to horror to heartbreak, sometimes in the space of ten or twenty pages, then back again to hilarity. It’s profane, loving, hardnosed, and completely beautiful. If you ever loved The Memory Keeper’s Daughter or The Secret Life of Bees, you have been waiting for this book and just didn’t know it. Idella and Avis, the sisters from Hardscrabble Bay, stole my heart. They’ll steal yours, as well. Read this book. And buy a copy for your best friend, because you’ll want to keep yours.”
Stephen King
This is a tale of two sisters over seventy years that recovers the vibrant and unforgettable voice of Beverly Jensen, whom Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, said has "rewritten the literary history of Maine."
In 1916, Idella and Avis Hillock live on the edge of a chilly bluff in New Brunswick, Canada; a hardscrabble world of potato farms, rough men, hard work, and baffling beauty. From "Gone," the heartbreaking account of the crisis that changed their lives forever, to the darkly comic "Wake," which follows the grown siblings' catastrophic efforts to escort the body of their father "Wild Bill" Hillock to his funeral, these stories of Idella and Avis offer a compelling and wry vision of two remarkable women. The vivid characters include Idella's philandering husband, her bewilderingly difficult mother-in-law, and Avis, whose serial romantic disasters never quell her irrepressible spirit. Jensen's work evokes a time gone by and reads like an instant American classic.
Praise