Author(s): Alice Elliott Dark

Fiction | Marianne's Book Talkers

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.

CONSTANT READER STAFF REVIEW: MARIANNE

If you’re on the hunt for a rich, absorbing, character-driven novel to sink your teeth into, look no further!

Fellowship Point tells the tale of the long friendship of Agnes and Polly, born practically side by side and still best friends at the age of 80. They’re thick as thieves but couldn’t be more different in their histories and choices. Polly is the devoted homemaker and Agnes, the solitary artist. What binds them together, though, is a deep care for each other and a love for the beautiful place their forebears passed down, Fellowship Point.

I won’t say too much about the plot, because in a way it feels beside the point. Plenty happens – there’s a well-kept literary secret, wrongful convictions, disagreeable adult children, new friendships, old loves, hidden histories revealed, and plenty of bird watching – but the joy for me was getting to know these two women in the ways they know each other, and sharing in their surprise that even after so much history, there are still discoveries to be made.