Evening Ferry

by Katherine Towler

Will the truth about her mother's death help her heal, or open new wounds?



Katherine Towler returns to Snow Island with Evening Ferry - the second installment of her multigenerational trilogy about family bonds, unexpected love, and the threat of war.

Thirty-two-year-old Rachel Shattuck grew up on Snow Island but left at the age of eighteen, anxious to escape the confines of the isolated community. Living on the mainland, just a short ferry ride away from Snow, she struggles to adjust to being divorced while grieving the recent death of her mother. In the summer of 1965, she returns to Snow Island to care for her injured father and discovers her mother's diaries hidden in a closet. Reading Phoebe Shattuck's account of her life as a wife and a mother, Rachel learns the truth about her family's history, her mother's death, and her own aspirations to lead a new life.

In elegant prose and inspired storytelling, Towler gives us a moving portrait of two women and the island they come to call home, at a time when the world is changing, and the country faces war once again.



Praise for Island

“Readers familiar with Snow Island, Katherine Towler’s fine first novel, will be further delighted by her return to those hardscrabble New England waterfolk in Evening a strong and deeply satisfying tale of the islanders’ lives, loves, and losses from the Great Depression of the 1930s to America’s war in Vietnam. Readers new to Towler’s fiction have a happy discovery awaiting them.” — John Barth, author of The Sot-Weed Factor and The Book of Ten Nights and a Night



“[Towler] imagines characters and an island life that feel remarkably real. Inner quandaries over love, sex, memories, dreams and codes of duty are rendered with a light but vivid elegance… by intertwining each era’s history and cultural shifts with the stories of individual islanders, Towler is creating a memorable regional trilogy.” — The Providence Journal



“When one is held in place by the past, the only way to move life forward is to find a way to break those chains. It is such a journey that Katherine Towler places at the center of Evening Ferry. Evening Ferry succeeds in part because the characters tell an interesting story, but also because of the way the novel takes the reader to a world far removed from present experience.” — The Denver Post



“Towler’s two books, with their overlapping characters and philosophies, interlock neatly, like pieces of a larger jigsaw already fully imagined… a compelling achievement.” — The Boston Globe

376 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 17, 2022

About the author

Katherine Towler is author of The Penny Poet of Portsmouth: A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship and the novels Snow Island, Evening Ferry,and Island Light. This literary trilogy is set on a fictional New England island and takes place between the early 1940s and early 1990s, chronicling the lives of two generations in two island families and the impact of war on the island community. Katherine is also co-editor with Ilya Kaminsky of A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith, a collection of conversations with poets. All three of her novels were Indiebound selected titles. Snow Island was also chosen as a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers title. Katherine grew up in New York City and attended the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins, and the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College. She teaches in the MFA Program in Writing at Southern New Hampshire University. She is happy to hear from book groups and to arrange Skype visits.