Audiobooks
Dark Harbor House
At the end of a pleasant summer wedding party, Sally and I were relaxing on the patio of an elegant inn in Dark Harbor on the Maine island of Islesboro. I looked up at the house, which had certainly been there most of a hundred years, and began to wonder what kinds of parties it might have hosted all those years ago. Our party -- this the sign of a modern time -- was to last only one day plus an overnight, but of course parties of an earlier age might have gone on much longer. I began to think of a summer house party that would last the whole summer . . .
It is late June, 1948. Liam Dwyer, having just finished his sophomore year at Cornell, has been invited by the Forsythe family to join them and their other guests in a summer-long house party. The other guests are, for the most part, college students -- both boys and girls -- of about his own age. The house itself, called Dark Harbor House, is a splendid Maine "cottage" (cottage in those days meant mansion). That is, it was splendid in its day. By the late 1940s it is somewhat run-down. The Forsythes have needed to scrimp to keep the place going at all. Their fortunes have depleted from the days when their parents and grandparents lived high with dozens in staff in the Maine summers. But if Dark Harbor House is a bit dilapidated, that's mostly lost on Liam. What's not lost on him is the presence of Laura Beauchalet who has just finished her sophomore year at Radcliffe. He knows, even before arriving, that he's half in love with Laura, who was sweet (if a bit distant) at last summer's party. This summer might be different. Thia summer there might be flirtation in their future, kissing perhaps, and, who knows? maybe even . . . but he mustn't allow his thought to go there.
The One-Way Time Traveler
A little joke on me to begin: I spent more than a year of my life writing The One-Way Time Traveler, and during that entire time, it never occurred to me that I am a one-way time traveler myself. So are you. Each
of us, like John Donegal, the protagonist of my story, comes from an
earlier time, one that was a lot less complicated. We occasionally feel
regrets about the past we left behind, but there's no going back. That's what it means to be a one-way time traveler.
Donegal is thrust forward in time some 300 years or more, and he
finds himself in a society which has become matriarchal. Men are second
class citizens and women are utterly in charge. The female over-class
has great affection for its "boys," but no great regard. Donegal is
left to puzzle out what it even means to be a man (the word has fallen
into disuse) in this strange modernity. At first he is appalled, but
eventually finds at least a few things to like about the way women have
used their new-found authority. If only it weren't for the damnable
humiliation ritual women impose upon their adult males . . .