My Favorite Fiction Set in Maine

This collection of stories (and its sequel, Olive Again) brims with quiet wisdom. It centers Olive, a flinty retired schoolteacher in the small town of Crosby, whose life is revealed from the perspectives of her husband, neighbors, Olive herself. I’ve returned to this book more times than I can count and am always astounded by its unflashy moments of extraordinary truth.

When her husband is hospitalized after a fishing accident, Jill Archer is faced with parenting her two teenage sons—“the wolves”—alone on a small, rugged island in Penobscot Bay. The dynamics in the family—the strain of motherhood, marriage, financial instability—are beautifully rendered and, like life in a struggling fishing village, unsentimentally real.

The twelve stories in this dazzling collection are set on Maine’s Penobscot Indian Nation Reservation. Woven together by the character of David, at different points in his life, they offer a wry, unflinching, mesmerizing portrait of a Native family and community in the twenty-first century.

In spring 2020, Alice has packed up her family and is leaving New York City, heading for their summer home in Maine. She’s seeking refuge from the pandemic and reeling from a betrayal in her marriage but, as this novel reveals with refreshing candor and intimacy, what she finds there is not the sanctuary she’d hoped.

Doris and Tup and their three children live on a dairy farm in the 1950s. Theirs is an idyllic existence, focused on the satisfactions of work and family, until an unspeakable tragedy befalls them, marking the end of life as they knew it. The aftermath is painful but described in some of the most beautiful prose I’ve ever read.

This story by the author of Goodnight Moon is a children’s book with the depth and beauty of great literature. Take, for example, the kitten who believes they’re a “little fur Island” and contemplates the nature of existence or the snow that arrives “like a great quiet secret in the night.” The Caldecott Medal-winning illustrations by Leonard Weisgard are magical too.

Three generations of the Kelleher clan are gathering at their beachfront cottage in Cape Neddick. Though the vacation spot is steeped in tradition—it’s been in the family sixty years—this summer feels different, as is poignantly revealed by the four women who narrate the story, each harboring struggles and secrets, resentments and regrets.

Now in their eighties, lifelong friends Agnes and Polly—one a childless children’s book author, the other a devoted wife and mother—return each year to their cottages on a peninsula called Fellowship Point. The women’s deep, complex friendship is so moving that upon reading the last page, I burst into tears—because I was sad? Because it was over? I’ve never done this before or since. Fittingly, I was in Maine, on a near-empty beach; the single other beachgoer asked what I was reading and bought a copy on the spot. I recommend everyone do the same.