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FELLOWSHIP POINT

by Alice Elliott Dark ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 5, 2022

Elegantly structured, beautifully written, and altogether diverting, with a powerful message about land ownership in America.

A sweeping story of lifelong best friends from Philadelphia Quaker families who share a vacation spot and a moral exigency.

Dark confesses in her acknowledgments that she had “doubts about the appeal of two old ladies,” but she's written the rare 592-page novel you'll be sorry to finish. Eighty-year-old spinster Agnes Lee is the successful author of two series of books. She’s known for one of them, 30-plus children’s tales about a 9-year-old named Nan. The other is written under a pseudonym, six sharp social satires following a circle of upper-class Philadelphia girls like the ones Agnes grew up with. But as the curtain opens in March 2000, Agnes is having her very first experience of writer's block, described in one of many astute passages about the writing life: “Agnes had lost hope for today, too, but her allotted writing time wasn’t up yet. So she sat. Her rule was five hours, and dammit she’d put in five hours.” Just as she packs it in for the day, her best friend, Polly Wister, a devoted wife and mother, arrives for a drink. “We have a problem,” says Agnes. The problem is that they are two of the last three shareholders in Fellowship Point, a large, and largely undeveloped, piece of coastal property in Maine where their families have vacationed for generations. After the two of them are gone, Agnes’ cousin, a wealthy dolt, seems likely to sell out to a developer who would tear down the 19th-century dwellings, destroy a nature sanctuary, and overrun an ancient Indigenous meeting ground to build a resort. Agnes and Polly have other problems, too, each of them held back by choices made long in the past, some of which will be dug out by a nosy young New York editor who’s determined to make Agnes write a memoir. You will surely want to read this book, but you may be able to use its essential wisdom right now: “There wasn’t time for withholding, not in this short life when you were only given to know a few people, and to have a true exchange with one or two.”

Pub Date: July 5, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-982131-81-4

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books

Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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New York Times Bestseller

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

SEEN & HEARD

BY ANY OTHER NAME

by Jodi Picoult ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 20, 2024

A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.

Who was Shakespeare?

Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name , “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.

Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024

ISBN: 9780593497210

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Jodi Picoult & Jennifer Finney Boylan

by Jodi Picoult

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By the Book

Alice Elliott Dark Ruins Books by Reading in the Bathtub

“I easily fall asleep and end up with a soggy bloated creature rather than a legible book,” says the author, whose new novel is “Fellowship Point.” “This works out well for the authors, as I always go buy another copy.”

Credit... Rebecca Clarke

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What books are on your night stand?

I keep “Upstream,” by Mary Oliver, and “Me & Other Writing,” by Marguerite Duras, by my bed and dip into them regularly. Both those books return me to my deeper purpose as a human and as a writer. I am reading “Crossroads,” by Jonathan Franzen, “Trust,” by Hernan Diaz, “Swann’s Way,” by Marcel Proust, “Ancestor Trouble,” by Maud Newton, and forthcoming books by Eliza Minot, Laila Halaby and Laura Spence-Ash. I listen to “The Lonely City,” by Olivia Laing, read by Susan Lyons, to go to sleep. I know it by heart!

What’s the last great book you read?

“The Ninth Hour,” by Alice McDermott. The opening sequence is a knockout, there is an unforgettable scene on a train, and the novel reveals itself to be a murder mystery past the halfway mark. That doesn’t begin to describe how brilliantly told this and all her books are, and how profoundly humane. She is a genius of the epiphany.

Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?

During the pandemic my writers’ reading group read the novels of E.M. Forster. I had read them years earlier but without such close attention. It’s very moving that Forster stopped writing at 45 after “A Passage to India,” but understandable. The book depicts intransigent impediments to his prewar ideal of “only connect.”

Can a great book be badly written? What other criteria can overcome bad prose?

I have read a lot of nonfiction and history books that don’t feature great prose. They overcome that weakness with good theses or information.

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

I love to read in the tub, but I easily fall asleep and end up with a soggy bloated creature rather than a legible book. This works out well for the authors, as I always go buy another copy. I have bought and drowned four copies of Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing” — that’s how powerful her message is. Otherwise, I like it to be summer and breezy, the air scented with spicy flowers, me in a comfortable chair or sofa with a cup of coffee and a pen for underlining.

What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?

I’ll mention three lesser-read novels by well-known authors. I deeply love “The Catherine Wheel,” by Jean Stafford, for its extraordinary and often very funny sentences. It takes place during a summer in Maine in a fusty old town and a house full of old-fashioned objects and habits, yet like her work in general it’s sobering about the nature of desire. “A Handful of Dust,” by Evelyn Waugh, always makes me squirm and hope I’m not deluding myself like Tony Last. It’s a scathing book that takes down the pretensions of class and empire as it entertains with quick brilliant scenes. “The Good Terrorist,” by Doris Lessing,” is a thorough look at radical squatters in London and what they understand and what they don’t.

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Friendship tested, lives transformed in sublime novel ‘Fellowship Point’

• Deep Read ( 4 Min. )
• By Heller McAlpin Contributor

Updated July 20, 2022, 3:24 p.m. ET

Author Alice Elliott Dark sets her sublime new novel, “Fellowship Point,” in Maine, which has long attracted writers with its rugged coastline and deep woodlands. 

The landscape lends itself to stories about tensions between locals and summer people, and between developers and conservationists. 

Why We Wrote This

Alice Elliott Dark’s magnificent novel affirms that change and growth are possible at any age. As her main characters let down their guard and shed old habits, they experience transformation.

At the same time, she celebrates the beauty – and sticking points – of a lifelong friendship between two women whose choices have taken them down different paths. 

At the novel’s center is 80-year-old Agnes Lee, a writer who is beloved for a series of children’s books. She, her best friend, and several other families spend summers at Fellowship Point. But now that part of the property is under threat from developers, Agnes wants to enlist her friend’s help to stop it.   

It is hard to write about this novel without gushing. Its characters, settings, and deftly woven plot pull you right in, the better to soak in its reflections on aging, writing, stewardship, legacies, independence, and responsibility. At its heart, “Fellowship Point” is about caring for the places and people we love.

Maine, long attractive to writers for its rocky coastlines, woodlands, and wildlife, lends itself to stories about tensions between locals and summer people, and between developers and conservationists. In her exquisitely written, utterly engrossing new novel, “Fellowship Point,” Alice Elliott Dark explores these strains while celebrating Maine’s gorgeous but threatened landscape. At the same time, she celebrates the beauty – and sticking points – of a lifelong friendship between two women whose choices have taken them down different paths.   

It is hard to write about this novel without gushing. You sink into it with a sigh of contentment, as into a hot bath. Its characters, settings, and deftly woven plot pull you right in, the better to soak in its reflections on aging, writing, stewardship, legacies, independence, and responsibility. At its heart, “Fellowship Point” is about caring for the places and people we love.

Dark is best known for her twice-filmed, prizewinning story, “In the Gloaming.” First published in The New Yorker in 1993, it is about a mother who, in losing a son to AIDS, rediscovers what it means to really love and be loved. Dark, who teaches creative writing at Rutgers-Newark, has been working on “Fellowship Point” for nearly 20 years. It shows. There is nothing half-baked about it.  

At the novel’s center is 80-year-old Agnes Lee, a writer who has never married. She is beloved for her “When Nan” series of children’s books about a plucky 9-year-old girl’s adventures, beginning with “When Nan Was a Lobsterman” in 1965 to the most recent installment, “When Nan Ran a Wind Farm.” But what Agnes considers her real work are her six “Franklin Square” novels, published one per decade under a pseudonym, which enabled her to write undercover about women from her tony Philadelphia social set. To her dismay, these women, like her best friend Polly Wister, made “themselves smaller in order to fit into the roles available to them. Their talents were subsumed into utility and support.” Agnes intended her books as “cautionary tales ... that real women would learn from.” 

We meet Agnes in 2000, struggling to write one last Franklin Square novel. She is less concerned about her recent cancer diagnosis than the future of Fellowship Point, the coastal peninsula in Maine where she has summered her whole life and felt most free and happy. In 1872, her great-grandfather, William Lee, a Philadelphia Quaker from a rich merchant family, bought 145 acres on Maine’s fictional Cape Deel and established the Fellowship Point Association with his brother and three Quaker friends. Its rules state that its five members would own shares in the association rather than individual plots of land. Further, shares tied to the five “capacious, yet not absurd” family cottages William designed were to be passed down to only one blood-relative member in each succeeding generation. Agnes and Polly are the current shareholders of their family’s cottages, Leeward and Meadowlee.  

William and his descendants have particularly treasured a 35-acre wildlife sanctuary at the property’s tip, dubbed the Sank. But to Agnes’ dismay, this hallowed land, formerly Abenaki territory, is threatened with desecration by a local developer who hopes to build a resort and village on Fellowship Point by luring shareholders with the promise of an economic windfall. Agnes’ counter-plan, which changes somewhat over the course of the novel, is to muster the required majority of shareholders – three votes – to dissolve the association and establish a trust to protect the land. She is counting on her friend Polly to support this move, but, frustratingly, Polly doesn’t do anything without consulting the men in her life.

Dark sets up a tug of war between Agnes’ strident independence and Polly’s deference to her self-important husband and money-hungry eldest son, who belittle her at every turn. Several contingent plotlines add intrigue, including the unfortunate ordeal of a smart local landscaper who is falsely accused of theft by Agnes’ ostentatious cousin Archie Lee, a shareholder eager to capitalize on his holdings. The other two original families no longer come to Fellowship Point, and we eventually learn what happened to one of them 40 years earlier. Dark cleverly uses Agnes’ intimate notebooks written at the time to pull off this long flashback.  

“Fellowship Point” has the complexity, pace, and length of an absorbing 19th century epic. Another narrative strand involves an ambitious New York editorial assistant named Maud Silver, who hopes she can jumpstart her publishing career by convincing Agnes to write a memoir callled “Agnes When,” about how she came to write the “When Nan” books, now celebrated for their proto-feminism. Agnes, with big secrets to hide, pushes back, but can’t help being impressed by Maud’s mettle – especially when she learns that the young woman, a single mother, is further saddled with the guardianship of her intractably depressed mother. 

The novel’s various plotlines dovetail with amazing grace, culminating in a moving, well-earned climax. “Fellowship Point” is, on one level, the story of how Agnes gradually lets down her guard and opens up, beginning with her uncharacteristic decision to share her notebooks from the early 1960s, a turning point in her life. “It’s awful what we do to ourselves by not talking openly,” she comments. Polly, too, blossoms with her recognition of how the “habit of a lifetime of acquiescence” had prevented her from recognizing her own intelligence. This magnificent novel affirms that change and growth are possible at any age.  

Heller McAlpin reviews books regularly for The Monitor, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR.

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Book Review: FELLOWSHIP POINT by Alice Elliott Dark

Alice Elliott Dark’s beautiful, sprawling novel Fellowship Point is about land and stewardship, about nature and conservation, but more than that, it is a book of friendship across the decades and about the complexities of women’s lives, told in part by two extraordinary narrators who experienced nearly a century of life in the world.

Agnes Lee and Polly Wister, in their eighties, have known each other all their lives, having become friends as children on the coast of Maine as neighbors in the idyllic community of Fellowship Point. They couldn’t be more different—Agnes is a fiercely independent, successful author who never married; Polly is the mother of three boys and an overly devoted wife to her demanding husband, Dick. As the novel opens, the two old friends meet to talk about the future of Fellowship Point. 

With its owners restricted by bylaws formed by its founders in the nineteenth century, Fellowship Point could be at risk of development rather than preservation, unless arrangements are made—and of particular concern is the thirty-five-acre sanctuary at the tip of the peninsula, known as “the Sank,” whose bird population, including eagles, could potentially disappear. Since the 1870s, when Fellowship Point was developed—five large family “cottages,” with a small cluster of houses for the staff of the homeowners—nature was the primary focus. Back then, the Lee family, “frugal and plain,” let their homes go while taking painstaking care of the land: “Wallpaper peeled. Dishes chipped. Silver tarnished. But the underbrush was carefully cleaned beneath the trees in the Sank, and the beds and meadows fed and artfully trimmed to appear Edenically wild.”

Agnes feels “sometimes she could draw on the beauty so whole-heartedly that she felt as though she had metabolized it, and that it had become an organ inside of her … she was determined to keep it safe for the birds, the animals, the flowers, the trees.” A true environmentalist—“All living creatures were whole. End of story”—Agnes had not eaten meat since she was three years old, and Nan, the heroine of her children’s books, “sprang from that sensibility.” 

Wanting to “make sure the Sank was protected by humans from humans,” Agnes exhorts her best friend, Polly, to help preserve the sanctuary. Yet to do so means Polly must stand up to her husband as well as her oldest son, neither of whom Agnes likes. Agnes believes Polly is far too dedicated to Dick; she’s most comfortable “at his beck.” And Dick is all too comfortable with this arrangement, in which he is the center of Polly’s life. Polly admits she’s a “slightly afraid” of her son, James, who is not the child she expected him to be: “Truth be told, he wasn’t all that pleasant to be with.” She often sees the ghost of her “favorite child,” Lydia, and she half-wishes Dick could “see the ghost, too, so they could share Lydia again.” 

Yet Polly and Dick remain distant from each other, until Dick’s declining health loosens his mind and tongue and allows for their first bit of true connection. Meanwhile, Agnes gets a letter from Maud Silver, a new assistant to her editor; Maud wants Agnes to write a memoir that will tell the story behind her popular  When Nan  books, and Agnes wants nothing to do with it. 

Maud’s narrative adds another layer to the story of the women of Fellowship Point. In New York, Maud lives with her three-year-old daughter, Clemmie, and her mother, Heidi, who struggles with episodes of mania alternating with debilitating depression, which she calls “turning blue,” as she had throughout Maud’s childhood. Heidi’s past is mysterious and unknown, even to her; childhood trauma has wiped out her memory, and though she has days that are good enough to allow her to help care for Clemmie, every day is a struggle, for both mother and daughter. It was Heidi who’d introduced a young Maud to the  When Nan  books, which both women read to Clemmie as well, and Maud’s mission becomes getting Agnes to tell the world the truths behind her life and work. 

When she gets nowhere with Agnes on the memoir via their correspondence, Maud visits Fellowship Point, where she and Agnes form a quick bond, and while Agnes doesn’t change her mind, she eventually offers Maud a series of notebooks, in the form of letters to her late sister, that reveals the story of the real-life Nan, along with its joys and heartbreak.

In lovely, page-turning prose, the novel weaves together the stories of Agnes, Polly, and Maud, all charming, wise narrators whose instant friendships feel nearly magical. Yet no friendship is seamless—Maud and Agnes argue over the memoir until the end the novel, and tensions rise slowly, then explosively, between Agnes and Polly. Though Agnes usually keeps her thoughts about Dick to herself (“He was really such a small man,” Agnes believes, “so inconsequential, and without the sense to know it”), Polly has long dealt with eye rolls or sardonic comments from Agnes on her husband and other topics; for example, Polly doesn’t want to talk about volunteering to help animals with Agnes because she knows what Agnes would say: “ If you want to help animals, don’t eat them. They really appreciate that.  Polly could supply Agnes’s lines from afar.” Eventually they fall out, and a year-long silence follows.

At nearly 600 pages long, the novel’s the conservation theme disappears for quite a while—the story reveals loves and friendships, secrets and losses, the wisdom and indignities of aging—and amid these engaging human stories is the constant natural beauty of Fellowship Point. Even when the land trust isn’t at the forefront, the sense of place—and what it means to those who live there—comes through vividly. 

The novel addresses, seemingly tangentially at first, the Indigenous peoples who inhabited the land long before, and it occasionally acknowledges the differences between the privileged Fellowship Point families and other residents, mostly through interactions with locals and their poorly treated dogs. Upon buying a starving, filthy puppy from an impoverished man on the side of the road, Agnes reflects: “I feel so saturated with Maine, but am so separate from its people.” 

Of course, all the advantages in the world can’t keep life’s realities at bay, whether accidents or illness or death. And the privilege of the Fellowship Point residents is tempered by the characters’ compassion, as well as their wit: When the family whose development company wants to turn the area into a resort and village crashes a party, they’re observed this way: “The Looses looked like a pack of bulldogs, all three squat and wide and panting. Who had comb marks in their hair in 2003? … Their pants were belted below their large, hard bellies. One wore white socks.”

The wise, warm, witty voices of the novel’s characters come together beautifully toward the book’s end, when the fate of Fellowship Point turns on a plot twist that feels shocking and inevitable at once. And, ultimately, the land’s future takes another turn entirely, one that was meant to be, and that should have been, all along. With its beautiful writing, natural setting, and deeply drawn characters,  Fellowship Point  is an absorbing, unforgettable, and fully engaging read.

Midge Raymond is a co-founder of Ashland Creek Press. She is the author of the novel My Last Continent and the award-winning short story collection Forgetting English . Her suspense novel, Devils Island , co-authored with John Yunker, is forthcoming from Oceanview Publishing in 2024, and her novel Floreana is forthcoming from Little A in 2025.

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Book Summary and Reviews of Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark

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Fellowship Point

by Alice Elliott Dark

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• Genre: Historical Fiction
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Book summary.

The masterful story of a lifelong friendship between two very different women with shared histories and buried secrets, tested in the twilight of their lives, set across the arc of the 20th century.

Celebrated children's book author Agnes Lee is determined to secure her legacy—to complete what she knows will be the final volume of her pseudonymously written Franklin Square novels; and even more consuming, to permanently protect the peninsula of majestic coast in Maine known as Fellowship Point. To donate the land to a trust, Agnes must convince shareholders to dissolve a generations-old partnership. And one of those shareholders is her best friend, Polly. Polly Wister has led a different kind of life than Agnes: that of a well-off married woman with children, defined by her devotion to her husband, and philosophy professor with an inflated sense of stature. She exalts in creating beauty and harmony in her home, in her friendships, and in her family. Polly soon finds her loyalties torn between the wishes of her best friend and the wishes of her three sons—but what is it that Polly wants herself? Agnes's designs are further muddied when an enterprising young book editor named Maud Silver sets out to convince Agnes to write her memoirs. Agnes's resistance cannot prevent long-buried memories and secrets from coming to light with far-reaching repercussions for all. Fellowship Point reads like a classic 19th-century novel in its beautifully woven, multilayered narrative, but it is entirely contemporary in the themes it explores; a deep and empathic interest in women's lives, the class differences that divided us, the struggle to protect the natural world, and, above all, a reckoning with intimacy, history, and posterity. It is a masterwork from Alice Elliott Dark.

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"Dark ( Think of England ) celebrates women's friendships and artistic mentorship in this expansive yet intimate novel. The families and their grudges and grievances fill a broad canvas, and within it Dark delves deeply into the relationships between Agnes and her work, humans and the land, mothers and children, and, most indelibly, the sustenance and joy provided by a long-held female friendship. It's a remarkable achievement." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A sweeping story of lifelong best friends...you will surely want to read this book. Elegantly structured, beautifully written, and altogether diverting, with a powerful message about land ownership in America." - Kirkus (starred review) "Dark's novel takes on serious topics, from patriarchy to capitalism, with a multifaceted main character and a story line that's as surprising as it is satisfying. Sure to please fans of literary women's fiction like the work of Elizabeth Strout." - Library Journal " Fellowship Point is a marvel. Intricately constructed, utterly unique, this novel set on the coast of Maine is filled with insights about writing, about the perils and freedoms of aging, about the great mysteries, as well as the pleasures, of life. The story about the relationships between three women unfolds, as life does, through joys and losses, confrontations and confessions, with twists along the way that change your perception of all that came before. This is a world is so closely and acutely observed that I felt I lived in it. I was sorry to leave." - Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times bestselling author " Fellowship Point is deeply relevant in its concerns—about the land, the creatures who inhabit it, and the legacies of ownership, stewardship, and friendship—but it's also just a great, absorbing, and transformative read. Like a Maine glade, Dark's book is filled with light." - Jo Ann Beard, author of Festival Days and In Zanesville "I fell into Fellowship Point --fell in step and in love with its characters, with its landscape, with its ideas about art and marriage and, above all, friendship. It's a beautifully passionate book about what it means to love a place and to love all the people of your life, and how life itself is a riveting plot and deep mystery." - Elizabeth McCracken, New York Times bestselling author of Bowlaway and The Giant's House

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Author Information

Alice elliott dark.

Alice Elliott Dark is the author Think of England and two collections of short stories, In the Gloaming and Naked to the Waist . Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times, Best American Short Stories , and O. Henry: Prize Stories , among others. Her award-winning story "In the Gloaming" was made into two films. Dark is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is an Associate Professor at Rutgers-Newark in the MFA program.

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Alice Elliott Dark's New Novel Knows the Ties That Bind

Alice Elliott Dark’s second novel, Fellowship Point (Scribner/Rucci, July), takes on currently relevant themes—feminism, aging, environmentalism—but the center is timeless: a story of women’s friendship. Agnes and Polly are lifelong best friends who have followed very different paths. Polly is married with children, deferential to her husband, affluent; Agnes is independent, a successful writer of feminist books for children and the author of a literary adult series written under a pseudonym.

Now 80, Agnes is struggling with her health and writers block and convincing Polly to join her in preserving Fellowship Point, a section of coastal land in Maine that has been in both women’s families for generations. The situation creates a litmus test for relationships with family, friends, and community, and the enduring connection of these two women is a lens with which to examine the arc of feminism across the 20th century.

Fellowship Point is an immersive, intimate, modern interpretation of a 19th-century novel—a literary page-turner that hits all the salient points of the long-entwined lives of two female friends.

The book’s history is its own story. World rights were sold to Simon & Schuster in 2002 based on a partial manuscript for a novel about a woman’s book club. Dark had just published her debut novel, Think of England , following two story collections. She wrote the contracted novel, originally called The Book Group , but she says when The Jane Austen Book Club came out, “it didn’t seem like a good idea to have a second one so I put the book away. I started another novel but couldn’t figure it out and put that one away as well.”

Then, Dark recalls, in 2011, at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, “I had hit a wall and just sat in a chair for many hours looking out the window when a character came to me. I wrote pages that didn’t end up in the book, but other characters arrived. When Agnes came in, she was larger than life and the energy shifted.”

The story, Dark says, was always about Maine, where she spent summers and her mother had a house, and she adds, “I always write about women. I’ve always been interested in the lives of women, especially old women. I didn’t think about it until someone asked me, ‘What is your book about?’ And I said, ‘Two old women.’ And then I thought, two old women is not the stuff of popular fiction! But even at 80, they are still changing, growing. I’m interested in all aspects of women—as children, as young women, as older women. The whole cycle of women’s lives is fascinating to me.”

Meanwhile, Dark’s agent, Henry Dunow of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner, who says he’s known her for 25 years “as an author and an agent and a friend,” tells me that “Alice had one editor after another and, for a long time, no editor. There were a lot of false starts.” When Jon Karp became publisher at S&S in 2010, Dunow asked him to “keep the faith, be patient, have belief in this author.” Karp did, and Dunow says this is “one of the happier publishing stories of belief, loyalty, and fairness.”

Dunow saw bits and pieces of Fellowship as Alice worked on it for the next 10 years. (“Henry bothered me once, in 2010,” Dark says). By 2018 she had a 1,400-page draft, which she cut to 800 pages and gave to Dunow, who felt it was a masterpiece. He reached out to S&S editorial director Marysue Rucci and asked if she would “watch over it.”

Rucci agreed with Dunow about Fellowship being a masterpiece. They revised the original contract, “rearranging the elements,” she says. When Rucci was given her own imprint at Scribner in August 2021, Fellowship Point went with her.

“We just kept hoping that at some point Alice would deliver,” Rucci says. “I left S&S, came back, and in 2018, Henry called me. ‘I have great news!’ he said. ‘What?’ I asked. ‘A manuscript from Alice. The only thing is, it’s 800 pages.’ ”

Rucci was intrigued when Dunow offered her the book; she was always a fan of Dark’s writing. “We cut 250 pages,” Rucci says. “Alice is an extraordinary revisor and so gracious. From the first you know you are with someone with extraordinary skill. When I got the imprint, I was hoping she would move with me. I thought it was the perfect book to anchor the inaugural list: the ideas of conservation, the possibilities, or not, for women. It’s a beautiful social critique and such a gorgeous friendship between these two women. People have said, ‘Finally! I can’t wait to give this to my best friend.’ ”

Dark didn’t know Rucci, but when she received a letter from her about how much she loved the book, Dark says, “it was unbelievable and exciting and gratifying and an overwhelming relief. Marysue responded with such enthusiasm. She was great to work with and I was very glad to go over to Scribner with her.”

Although Dark says she started Fellowship Point before the Ferrante books, she was excited by the fact that her character Agnes is an anonymous author like Ferrante. “I could watch the reactions,” she says. “It was timely.”

Dark also did a lot of research about women donating land and land preservation. “They were not strongly attached to landowning like men,” she explains, “and didn’t have control of land until the beginning of the 20th century, but they had the urge to protect it.” She cites Roxanne Quimby, the cofounder of Burt’s Bees, who bought land all over the United States, particularly in Maine, and donated over 87,000 acres to the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument established in 2016.

Dunow calls Fellowship Point “a 19th-century novel whose twists and turns would make Charles Dickens blush—an old-fashioned story but very contemporary in themes and concerns,” while Dark tells me she loves 19th-century novels and wanted to write one but make it modern.

The idea of modern doesn’t follow when I ask for her email.

She laughs. “I’m one of three people who still has AOL,” she says. “It’s a badge of honor!”

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Fellowship Point

By alice elliott dark.

A lifelong friendship between two women in their 80s hits a breaking point in Alice Elliott Dark’s second novel. Agnes Lee and Polly Wister couldn’t be more different. Agnes is an unmarried, successful author who is ready to write the last installment of her popular series, while Polly is a devoted wife and mother to three sons who has committed her life to supporting her family. The two friends jointly own a mostly undeveloped plot of land off the coast of Maine. Instead of passing it down to the next generation, Agnes wants to preserve the property by donating it to a land trust, ensuring that Polly’s oldest son will never be able to develop on it. It’s a conversation that sets off a series of revelations between the two women about how they really view each other. At nearly 600 pages, Fellowship Point reads like an epic, but at its center lies a friendship full of heart, humor, and love. — Annabel Gutterman

Buy Now : Fellowship Point on Bookshop | Amazon

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The Book of Goose

Mouth to mouth, life between the tides.

Hateship, loveship, friendship in ‘Fellowship Point’

Alice elliott dark’s new novel focuses on women’s lives.

“A handful of names and a street map.” That’s what one admired author once told me you needed to write a novel. If so, Alice Elliott Dark’s powerful, enchanting “ Fellowship Point ” takes that maxim into the stratosphere.

True, “Fellowship” supplies some tasty names — Robert Circumstance, Hamm Loose — and a delicious, “Treasure Island”-style map of its title’s peninsula on the coast of Maine (trimmed with gulls, sailboats, graveyard, pine trees). These are only groundwork. And don’t worry about retaining anything. It will become as intimate as if you lived there.

Disclosure: You may want to live there.

Dark fans who devoured “In the Gloaming” and other, earlier works, rejoice. Striking from the first for its clear, sharply intelligent voice, streaming wisdom and wit on nearly all of close to 600 pages, “Fellowship” embodies a magnificent storytelling feat.

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Three women take narrative turns, from alternating locales and eras. Central to them — to us — is Agnes Lee, age 80, author of a wildly successful children’s book series. Under a pseudonym, Agnes also writes a popular adult series, tracking the lives (Mary McCarthy-like) of a group of young women.

Why the pen name? For perfect freedom. “[T]here was no chance she could be in society and skewer it, too.” Equally, “to inoculate herself from succumbing to the fates of her friends ... as they married or got jobs. It galled her to see them make themselves smaller ... subsumed into utility and support. ... [I]t was harder for girls who’d grown up as she had [privileged, educated] to notice exactly when they’d been conscripted into the power structure. ... [Agnes] had a clear visceral objection. It was her subject...”

Boy, is it ever. A pitiless noticer and truth-teller, Agnes rarely plays nicely. Results — in unfurling relationships with family, friends, lovers, almost-lovers — are gratifying and heart-shredding. Some of the many miracles of this dense, bristling, multilayered work are its gut-level reality checks on modern sex, love, money, class, aging, and power. Yet though it fearlessly faces down topical problems (ecology, marriage, inequality) “Fellowship” remains compassionately complex, avoiding polemic, caricature, or infomercials. Its life is rooted in loyalty to humanness, to people so real you can see, hear, and smell them.

Despite her age and quiet bouts with cancer, Agnes has “not slowed down. ... Her remaining work was urgent, and she was well aware of working alongside the specter of the unknown moment of her last breath.”

Within this tightening frame we meet other major players: Polly, Agnes’s neighbor on the Point and lifelong best friend; Maud, a young New York editor of Agnes’s books and struggling single mother; Maud’s own mother, Heidi, a brave but lonely manic-depressive whose tragic origins seem clouded. Significant men figure: the above-named, wise and kindly Robert, the venal Hamm, and their forebears.

Forebears matter. The Point, a partnership founded by Quakers, is now run by a handful of surviving shareholders — among them Polly and Agnes. When the Loose clan threatens to develop the pristine land (home to fragile flora, fauna, and Indigenous artifacts), Agnes works fiercely to convince shareholders to donate it to a protecting trust. Loyalties clash — including those of Polly and Agnes, who’ve known each other “so well that their speech was as vertical in nature as a good poem, and a glance could stand for a dialogue.”

When Polly’s eyes fill after learning of Agnes’s diagnosis, Agnes has no time for it: “Polly! ... There are upsides. Cancer is a conversation stopper. And there are very few conversations I don’t want to stop.”

So much is deeply considered: facets of memory, family (parent viewing child; child assessing parent), death and grief, thwarted love, socio-ecological responsibility. “[T]he world needed places free of human notions. She knew what people were like, herself included. ... [S]he wanted to make sure the [land] was protected by humans from humans.”

In the braided voices of Agnes, Polly, and Maud, “Fellowship” fairly thunders with authority. Maud, on raising a toddler: “No one told you that you’d be all right with your child’s worst scents.” On her career: “[Her] very particular way of being a feminist ... was not to mimic traditionally masculine behaviors. There was ... [a] freer way.” Agnes on the aging, never-married, lone artist: “She’d only loved a few people. Most of those had been dead for a long time now.” Polly, suffering a bright woman’s anguish in marriage to a blinkered man, on noticing her grown children too late: “such beasts!”

Yet this wealth of rumination never sags, or drags. Instead it manages a seamless fluidity between interiority and scene, gathering relentless momentum, drawing us in tight as it pushes toward a stinging culmination — to resolve (secrets spilled, mysteries cracked) by its amazing close.

What may be most astonishing is Dark’s ability to totally inhabit a series of disparate characters down to the DNA — to walk around in their skins: a canny, contemporary George Eliot. (The novel’s heart ponders friendship: perhaps everyone’s final frontier.)

But its ultimate character must be the lush, craggy Point itself, a monumental given, stately as its weather, which Dark delivers with painterly care. Its glittering sea, forests, wildlife, rocky promontories, troves of ancient leavings and legacies — seep into human doings, as palpable and breathing as all its denizens. “Fellowship Point” gives us a world.

FELLOWSHIP POINT

By Alice Elliott Dark

Scribner/Marysue Rucci Books, 592 pages, $28.99

Joan Frank’s latest novel is “ The Outlook for Earthlings .” Forthcoming in fall are a short novel, “Juniper Street,” and an essay collection, “Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading.”

Fellowship Point

52 pages • 1 hour read

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Summary and Study Guide

Allice Elliott Dark’s Fellowship Point (2022) begins as an elderly woman’s quest to protect the Maine peninsula she loves (Fellowship Point) from development. As the novel unfolds, it showcases the friendship between this woman ( Agnes Lee ) and her lifelong companion (Polly Wister), who have spent summers together on the Point since their childhood. Coming of age at a time when roles for women were limiting, Agnes and Polly have taken separate paths but remained intensely connected to one another. As both women reckon with aging and life fulfillment, Agnes (the author of a children’s book series) is approached to write a memoir . In doing so, Agnes wrestles with divulging secrets she has kept hidden for decades.

Dark, the author of two novels and two short story collections, is best known for her award-winning short story “In the Gloaming” (1993), which was included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century and adapted into two different films. That story, like Fellowship Point , tackles themes of illness and aging. Dark has also authored essays and reviews, appearing in publications such as The New York Times and The Washington Post . She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and is an Associate Professor at Rutgers-Newark, where she teaches in the MFA program.

This guide references the 2022 hardcover edition of Fellowship Point by Scribner Books from Simon & Schuster.

Content Warning: The novel and this guide refer to depression, mental illness, and death by suicide as well as age-related cognitive decline and other health concerns.

Plot Summary

The novel opens as Agnes Lee, author of the When Nan children’s series, tries to begin a new novel, this one for a different series, called the Franklin Square books, which she authors under a pseudonym . In addition, Agnes convinces her friend, Polly Wister, to assist her in establishing a land trust for the property the two have inherited on Fellowship Point in Maine. Agnes is concerned that future development of the Point will diminish the habitat of the eagles and other wildlife dwelling there. Polly, whose husband, Dick Wister (a professor of philosophy), has just retired, agrees with Agnes. During the next several months, Polly neglects to present the idea outright to Dick (who she gleans will disagree), or share with Agnes that her son, James, disapproves of the idea. Meanwhile, Agnes undergoes a double mastectomy, which successfully removes cancerous cells. She continues to try to write during her summer stay at Leeward Cottage (her family’s home on Fellowship Point) but can’t find the inspiration to begin. In addition, she has received a letter from a young woman in the New York publishing industry named Maud Silver , who wants to Agnes to draft a memoir so that Maud might edit it. This nags at Agnes, who is unsure whether she really wants to write a memoir. Eventually, Agnes relents.

Polly’s husband, Dick, undergoes a mental decline. In the early morning hours, Polly finds him reminiscing about his youth and opening up in ways she has longed for during their entire marriage. Agnes finds Dick (who has always lived a life of letters) pompous, especially in the way he belittles Polly rather than encouraging her intellect. Polly has been content as a mother of three boys, though with the birth of each one, she longed for a daughter. She finally had a daughter, Lydia, but the girl died of an illness at age nine. Since then, Polly has mourned the loss of Lydia, whose ghost she’s certain she sees around the Point.

Agnes and Polly are both dismayed when Robert Circumstance , the caretaker of Fellowship Point, is accused of perpetrating theft at the home of Archie Lee, Agnes’s cousin. Robert is incarcerated for two years, during which he corresponds with Dick by letter. Dick, however, succumbs to dementia and passes away. When Polly learns of Robert’s correspondence with Dick, she begins writing to Robert herself, and their exchange continues for the duration of Robert’s prison term.

Agnes invites the editor she’s been corresponding with, Maud Silver, to stay at Leeward Cottage on Fellowship Point. Upon arriving, Maud immediately falls in love with the Point, relishing its natural beauty just as Agnes has. She and Agnes develop a professional friendship, engaging in daily discussions about literature and Agnes’s memoir. Maud is frustrated with the draft, certain that Agnes has intentionally omitted something important. She senses that there’s more to the story of the importance of Fellowship Point and the When Nan books. Maud’s time on the peninsula, however, is cut short when she must return to aid her mother, who has long experienced depression and mental illness and has now been hospitalized. Weeks after Maud leaves, the 9/11 attacks occur, and Agnes and Polly have a fight, after which they don’t speak to each other for months. Meanwhile, Agnes helps Maud obtain care for her mother, Heidi Silver, at the hospital in Philadelphia where Agnes has served as a board member. Maud then divides her time between Agnes’s Philadelphia apartment and her native Manhattan, where she raises her young daughter, Clemmie.

During this time, Agnes shares with Maud a series of notebooks containing writing that she completed in 1960. It consists of a series of letters to her deceased sister, Elspeth, which function as journal entries. In them, Agnes recounts becoming acquainted with Nan and Virgil Reed . Nan (the inspiration for the When Nan books) was the young daughter of Virgil, a relation of the Reed family, who owned a cottage on the Point. Virgil was reclusive and neglectful of young Nan, whom Agnes took under her wing and began caring for. Nan was seriously injured when she was pinned beneath a headstone in the cemetery , and this, coupled with Agnes’s reading Virgil’s published novel, drew the two together. A friendship developed wherein Virgil shared his writing in progress with Agnes, and she encouraged him. She came to believe that Virgil might be her soulmate but was dismayed when he and Karen, the young librarian who was tutoring Nan, announced their engagement. The same night, Virgil and Karen died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Nan was removed from the peninsula to live with relatives. A few years later, Agnes learned that Nan too had passed away.

As 2002 unfolds, Robert is released from prison and returns to Fellowship Point. Agnes and Polly resolve their argument and carry on as if nothing happened. Agnes shares with Polly her feelings about Virgil and agrees to meet with Maud again in an attempt to finally complete the memoir. When Maud arrives with her young daughter in tow, Agnes and Polly are shocked by how much she resembles Nan. They deduce that Heidi Silver, Maud’s mother, is Nan Reed. At the end of the summer, they bring Heidi to the peninsula, where she, Maud, Clemmie, Robert, and the others attend the annual summer’s-end party. Heidi’s memories slowly return. Agnes and Maud continue to work together, focusing on the final installment of the Franklin Square series, since Maud has deduced that Agnes is their author. Agnes comes to a decision about the ownership of Fellowship Point: It should be returned to the Indigenous Wabanaki peoples, many of whom still inhabit the area. She explains this in a letter to Polly, who has just passed away.

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In Alice Elliott Dark’s second novel, “Fellowship Point,” Agnes Lee and Polly Wister have been friends for about 80 years. Their intertwined families own homes on a Maine peninsula, and some of the book’s drama stems from their efforts to preserve the land and keep it out of the hands of developers.

“The issue of land, land ownership, land conservation has always been of deep interest to me,” Dark says on this week’s podcast. “I came to that pretty quickly as I was developing this story. I decided I wanted to write something like a 19th-century-style novel, and I wanted to have it be modern. Women didn’t own land in the 19th century. They didn’t make decisions about land, even if they did own it, and having women landowners dealing with these issues seemed to me a modern version of a big, older, 19th-century-type novel.”

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• About the Book

The masterful story of a lifelong friendship between two very different women with shared histories and buried secrets, tested in the twilight of their lives, set across the arc of the 20th century.

Celebrated children’s book author Agnes Lee is determined to secure her legacy --- to complete what she knows will be the final volume of her pseudonymously written Franklin Square novels, and even more consuming, to permanently protect the peninsula of majestic coast in Maine known as Fellowship Point. To donate the land to a trust, Agnes must convince shareholders to dissolve a generations-old partnership. And one of those shareholders is her best friend, Polly.

Polly Wister has led a different kind of life than Agnes: that of a well-off married woman with children, defined by her devotion to her husband and philosophy professor with an inflated sense of stature. She exalts in creating beauty and harmony in her home, in her friendships and in her family. Polly soon finds her loyalties torn between the wishes of her best friend and the wishes of her three sons. But what is it that Polly wants herself?

Agnes’ designs are further muddied when an enterprising young book editor named Maud Silver sets out to convince Agnes to write her memoirs. Agnes’ resistance cannot prevent long-buried memories and secrets from coming to light with far-reaching repercussions for all.

FELLOWSHIP POINT reads like a classic 19th-century novel in its beautifully woven, multilayered narrative, but it is entirely contemporary in the themes it explores --- a deep and empathic interest in women’s lives, the class differences that divide us, the struggle to protect the natural world, and, above all, a reckoning with intimacy, history and posterity. It is a masterwork from Alice Elliott Dark.

Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark

• Publication Date: May 9, 2023
• Genres: Fiction , Women's Fiction
• Paperback: 608 pages
• Publisher: S&S/Marysue Rucci Books
• ISBN-10: 1982131829
• ISBN-13: 9781982131821

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Fellowship Point: A Novel Hardcover – July 5, 2022

• Print length 592 pages
• Language English
• Publisher S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books
• Publication date July 5, 2022
• Dimensions 6 x 1.7 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 1982131810
• ISBN-13 978-1982131814
• See all details

4 stars and above

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books; First Edition (July 5, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 592 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1982131810
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1982131814
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.8 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.7 x 9 inches
• #1,108 in Friendship Fiction (Books)
• #3,247 in Women's Friendship Fiction
• #5,860 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction

About the author

Alice elliott dark.

Alice Elliott Dark is the author of the novels Fellowship Point and Think of England, and two collections of short stories, In The Gloaming and Naked to the Waist. Her work has appeared in, among others, The New Yorker, Harper's, DoubleTake, Ploughshares, A Public Space, Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O.Henry Awards, and translated into many languages. "In the Gloaming," a story, was chosen by John Updike for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of The Century and was made into films by HBO and Trinity Playhouse. Her non-fiction reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many anthologies.

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• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 62% 24% 9% 3% 2% 24%
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• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 62% 24% 9% 3% 2% 2%

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Customers say

Customers find the story rich, moving, and memorable. They praise the writing quality as beautiful, eloquent, and masterful. Readers describe the book as exceptional, brilliant, and worth the investment of time. They appreciate the richly developed characters and the thought-provoking content. They also find the book touching and evocative. Reader also mention the book is full of wonderful images.

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Customers find the story rich, moving, and profound. They describe the plot as stunning, interesting, and memorable. Readers also mention the book has a magnificent journey and a beautiful climax.

"I was lost in the beautiful writing and pulled by the gripping plot . I loved this book and can't wait to have it far enough in the past to re-read it." Read more

"...But lively descriptions of the landscapes etc. and so memorable in the solitariness ...." Read more

"...work; stay with it because everything ties together in a beautiful climax and conclusion . “..." Read more

"...best friends Agnes and Polly—who are living meaningful, active, fun , and interesting lives with their friends and families, and who both have rich..." Read more

Customers find the writing quality of the book beautiful, eloquent, and rich. They say the author is a master of language and the plot is stunning. Readers also mention the characters are sympathetically drawn.

"I was lost in the beautiful writing and pulled by the gripping plot. I loved this book and can't wait to have it far enough in the past to re-read it." Read more

"...It is beautifully written but the annoying drilled down detail is enough to make me drink...." Read more

"...Fellowship Point” has inspired me to write , to value friendships and family, and to respect the natural beauty of this world." Read more

"...This is one of those rare books where the sheer beauty of the language will cause the reader to pause and reread a passage, just to savor the author..." Read more

Customers find the book exceptional, brilliant, and worth the investment of time. They say it's beautifully written with no wasted words. Readers also appreciate the tenacity, inner weaknesses, and flawed characters.

"...With that said, I encourage you to read this extraordinary work ; stay with it because everything ties together in a beautiful climax and conclusion. “..." Read more

"...and her descriptions of summer in Maine are gorgeous; the book is worth reading for that alone...." Read more

"...Beautiful story told at the highest level. Excellent ." Read more

"...Dark’s characters are so real, flawed , and her writing makes sure that we see the humanity in all of them...." Read more

Customers find the main characters richly developed. They appreciate the author's humor and mastery of omniscient narration for two characters.

"...The characters became more interesting and I began to care about them. I'm not done yet but ALMOST!..." Read more

"I really loved this book and its characters ...." Read more

"...I loved Alice Elliott Dark's humor, her mastery of omniscient narration for TWO characters (not one, which is pretty unusual), plus her her warts-..." Read more

"...It’s almost as though Dark started one novel, a compelling study of character , friendship, family, and place, but then let it lapse into something..." Read more

Customers find the book insightful, thoughtful, and a complete feast for the mind. They also say it's poignant and revelatory. Readers mention the characters are interesting, smart, and sometimes aggravating.

"...told me to persevere, and the payoff was greatly rewarding and even empowering ...." Read more

"...like a beautifully crafted puzzle, one that’s good company and good food for thought ." Read more

"The richest and most moving novel I have read in years, and one of the most profound and capacious portraits ever of a group of American women’s..." Read more

"...Ms. Dark’s story of Agnes and Polly is rich in character, with surprising twists that could only result from decades-long lives...." Read more

Customers find the book evocative, touching, and stunning. They say it's rich with different kinds of love and tensions. Readers also say the book paints a realistic picture of loneliness. They mention it brings up emotions and beautifully examines many themes.

"...It paints a realistic Picture of the loneliness that living brings. And how to women coped...." Read more

"...FELLOWSHIP POINT got me and held me. It is a story of a believable and deep friendship between two women--very different from one another, both..." Read more

"...I'm reading along, loving this realistic, warm view of adult female friendships and aging...." Read more

"...Among the many themes so beautifully examined in this novel is the complexity and transcendent beauty of the bonds between our closest friends and..." Read more

Customers find the book beautiful, full of wonderful images, and lively descriptions of the landscapes. They also appreciate the lovely picture of the Maine coast.

"...Not a lot of action. But lively descriptions of the landscapes etc. and so memorable in the solitariness...." Read more

"...Dark writes beautifully, and her descriptions of summer in Maine are gorgeous ; the book is worth reading for that alone...." Read more

"...novel I have read in years, and one of the most profound and capacious portraits ever of a group of American women’s lives and inner worlds...." Read more

"...The author uses such vivid imagery describing Fellowship Point the the reader's heart falls in love with the hallowed ground and the characters..." Read more

Customers find the book tedious, hard to follow, and boring. They say it doesn't hold their interest and bogs down at the end.

"...Both have the minds the main characters as base. Not a lot of action . But lively descriptions of the landscapes etc...." Read more

"...picked up the pace and became interesting in the middle, bogged down again at the end , and worst of all, pulled several astonishing rabbits out of..." Read more

"...I found it to be long and tedious ...." Read more

"...beautifully but as others before me have stated, this is a chore to get through . In fact I am abandoning it 1/3 the way through...." Read more

Reviews with images

Fellowship Point—transformative and engaging

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Fellowship Point: A Novel

Fellowship Point was a joy to read. Alice Elliott Dark has crafted unforgettable characters in a sweeping story of friendship, family, and life as a whole. I hit pause on the real world for a bit and fell deeply in love with this gem of a novel.

Description

“A magnificent storytelling feat” ( The Boston Globe) story of lifelong friendship between two very different “superbly depicted” ( The Wall Street Journal ) women with shared histories, divisive loyalties, hidden sorrows, and eighty years of summers on a pristine point of land on the coast of Maine, set across the arc of the 20th century. Celebrated children’s book author Agnes Lee is determined to secure her legacy—to complete what she knows will be the final volume of her pseudonymously written Franklin Square novels; and even more consuming, to permanently protect the peninsula of majestic coast in Maine known as Fellowship Point. To donate the land to a trust, Agnes must convince shareholders to dissolve a generations-old partnership. And one of those shareholders is her best friend, Polly. Polly Wister has led a different kind of life than Agnes: that of a well-off married woman with children, defined by her devotion to her husband, a philosophy professor with an inflated sense of stature. She strives to create beauty and harmony in her home, in her friendships, and in her family. Polly soon finds her loyalties torn between the wishes of her best friend and the wishes of her three sons—but what is it that Polly wants herself? Agnes’s designs are further muddied when an enterprising young book editor named Maud Silver sets out to convince Agnes to write her memoirs. Agnes’s resistance cannot prevent long-buried memories and secrets from coming to light with far-reaching repercussions for all. “An ambitious and satisfying tale” (The Washington Post), Fellowship Point reads like a 19th-century epic, but it is entirely contemporary in its “reflections on aging, writing, stewardship, legacies, independence, and responsibility. At its heart, Fellowship Point is about caring for the places and people we love...This magnificent novel affirms that change and growth are possible at any age” (The Christian Science Monitor).

About the Author

Alice Elliott Dark is the author the novels Fellowship Point and Think of England, as well as two collections of short stories, In the Gloaming and Naked to the Waist. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times, Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry: Prize Stories, among others. Her award-winning story “In the Gloaming” was made into two films and was chosen for inclusion in Best American Stories of the Century. Dark is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is an associate professor at Rutgers-Newark in the MFA program.

Praise for Fellowship Point: A Novel

"It is very much an epic read, a book for readers who want to settle in for a story at a near whopping 600 pages by the author of one of my favorite short stories ever, 'In the Gloaming.'" —John Searles,  NYTimes -Bestselling Author of  Strange but True , via The Today Show "5 Summer Reads You Won't Want to Put Down" "A sweeping story of lifelong best friends...you will surely want to read this book. Elegantly structured, beautifully written, and altogether diverting, with a powerful message about land ownership in America." — Kirkus (Starred Review) “Dark ( Think of England ) celebrates women’s friendships and artistic mentorship in this expansive yet intimate novel. The families and their grudges and grievances fill a broad canvas, and within it Dark delves deeply into the relationships between Agnes and her work, humans and the land, mothers and children, and, most indelibly, the sustenance and joy provided by a long-held female friendship. It’s a remarkable achievement.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) " Fellowship Point is a marvel. Intricately constructed, utterly unique, this novel set on the coast of Maine is filled with insights about writing, about the perils and freedoms of aging, about the great mysteries, as well as the pleasures, of life. The story about the relationships between three women unfolds, as life does, through joys and losses, confrontations and confessions, with twists along the way that change your perception of all that came before. This is a world is so closely and acutely observed that I felt I lived in it. I was sorry to leave." — Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times bestselling author "I can’t remember the last time I’ve fallen so hard for a book. Fellowship Point is about many things: friendship, secrets, legacy, love, family—but the true magic here is in the writing. Alice Elliott Dark has conjured a world so immersive I can still feel it in my bones. I mourned the finish, when I would have to leave behind the characters I grew to love. This captivating, unforgettable novel is thrillingly good.” —   Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, New York Times  bestselling author of Nest and Good Company " Fellowship Point is deeply relevant in its concerns—about the land, the creatures who inhabit it, and the legacies of ownership, stewardship, and friendship—but it’s also just a great, absorbing, and transformative read.  Like a Maine glade, Dark’s book is filled with light."  —Jo Ann Beard, author of Festival Days and In Zanesville "I positively inhaled this novel--and then stingily meted out the last few pages, not wanting it to end. FELLOWSHIP POINT is a marvel--masterfully executed, beautifully layered, huge-hearted and sharp-witted--and Alice Elliott Dark is a writer of great empathy and incredible skill."   —Claire Lombardo,  New York Times Bestselling  author of The Most Fun We Ever Had “I fell into  Fellowship  Point --fell in step and in love with its characters, with its landscape, with its ideas about art and marriage and, above all, friendship. It's a beautifully passionate book about what it means to love a place and to love all the people of your life, and how life itself is a riveting plot and deep mystery.”  —Elizabeth McCracken,  New York Times  bestselling author of  Bowlaway  and  The Giant’s House  "Alice Elliott Dark is a writer I’ve long admired. With the splendid, engrossing Fellowship Point she has written a novel that is both sweeping and intimate as it deftly explores friendship, class, and the tricky nature of time." —Meg Wolitzer, New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion and The Interestings “This is a virtuosic performance, indisputably a work of genius, but even fervent adjectives can’t capture the almost numinous effect of reading these pages. In Fellowship Point , one feels oneself in the rare presence of the truly sublime. Every exactingly described gesture, every bit of inspired characterization, every gorgeous sentence is run through an obsessive mind grappling indefatigably with the weightiest materials: the powerful gravity of enduring relationships and the psychic costs of managing them; the sometimes-crushing conflict between duty to self and responsibility to others; and the desperate urge to conserve a small corner of a stressed-out planet and defend a worthy way of life from extinction. The equal manner in which the past and present, like overlaid supersaturated transparencies, come so vividly to bloom in one book recalls the bottomless ambitions of the timeless greats—which is fitting, as Alice Elliott Dark is one of the best writers working in English today.”   —Matthew Thomas,  New York Times  bestselling author of  We Are Not Ourselves   “I loved Fellowship Point so intensely and so tremendously, I’m struggling to find words that capture its brilliance. At once a rich, deeply felt investigation of female friendship and a bold novel of ideas, Fellowship Point offers the most profound pleasures. It reminded me of my favorite novels—those I return to, over and over— Great Expectations , Howards End , Middlemarch . I wanted to live inside it forever.”  — Joanna Rakoff, author of  My Salinger Year   “I've just sat up nearly all night finishing Alice Dark's Fellowship Point . Dark took over a decade to craft this magnificent novel, and the result is an instant classic: an epic tale of love, family, friendship, literature, and the American landscape, laid out on the capacious scale of a nineteenth-century classic, yet effortlessly contemporary in its voice. Tracing her story over decades and generations, Dark offers a portrayal of the complex inner worlds of three extraordinary women with an unerring insight that rivals that of Edith Wharton, or Elena Ferrante. Replete with humor, irony, gimlet-eyed observation of social mores, and a deep underlying spirituality, it's a novel so immersive you don't just read it, but practically move into it, like one of the rambling, shingled summer "cottages" that come to life in its pages. We readers emerge at the end with a deep nostalgia for the wind-battered pines, lingering ghosts, and imperiled eagles' nests of Dark's unforgettable Maine coast.” — Andrea Lee, author of Red Island House

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