Agnes balks when Maud Silver, a 27-year-old editorial assistant, tries to spur her to write a memoir about the genesis of her children’s books. She’s the pseudonymous author of a best-selling series of satirical novels in which she wickedly skewers her wealthy Philadelphian female cohort. Fellowship Point is a pristinely preserved place where every year they find “the same old lobster buoys and the boom of the ocean and the whistles in the treetops,” and where “the moss and ground cover yearned toward the spears of light, and the shadows were bubbles of cool.”Īgnes Lee, the novel’s driving force, is a prickly, solitary, unmarried, childless vegetarian, as well as a famous children’s book writer with a secret identity.

Their long intertwined families, wealthy Philadelphian Quakers, own “cottages” on a Maine peninsula. The two women at the center of Alice Elliott Dark’s enthralling, masterfully written new novel have been friends for about 80 years, since they were babies. They are in full possession of the bulk of their life’s trajectory, so their primary aim is to resolve and make sense of things before they die. They’re not finished yet, but they are as busy reckoning with the past as they are living in the present. Unlike younger protagonists, they already know who they’ve become and what they’ve made of their lives. Novels featuring older characters are well suited to an exploration of questions about time, history and change.

Dark life book 2