Spartina

By John Casey

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Spartina (1989) is John Casey's novel about Dick Pierce, a Rhode Island fisherman fighting to finish a boat of his own on Narragansett Bay. Pierce scrapes a living from the salt marshes and coastal waters while money troubles, an affair and a coming hurricane press on his pride and his place in a changing shore town. The boat he names Spartina becomes both his livelihood and the measure of whether he can stay his own man.

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• Stephen King: “On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition (Scribner, 2010), per afterword list in On Writing (10th anniv. ed.)”