Please join Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and PRINT: A Bookstore for the launch of W.S. Winslow’s debut, The Northern Reach, a heart-wrenching first novel about the power of place and family ties, the weight of the stories we choose to tell, and the burden of those we hide.
Please RSVP here to receive the Zoom link.
Frozen in grief after the loss of her son at sea, Edith Baines stares across the water at a schooner, under full sail yet motionless in the winter wind and surging tide of the Northern Reach. Edith seems to be hallucinating. Or is she? Edith’s boat-watch opens The Northern Reach, set in the coastal town of Wellbridge, Maine, where townspeople squeeze a living from the perilous bay or scrape by on the largesse of the summer folk and whatever they can cobble together, salvage, or grab.
At the center of town life is the Baines family, land-rich, cash-poor descendants of town founders, along with the ne’er-do-well Moody clan, the Martins of Skunk Pond, and the dirt farming, bootlegging Edgecombs. Over the course of the twentieth century, the families intersect, interact, and intermarry, grappling with secrets and prejudices that span generations, opening new wounds and reckoning with old ghosts.
W. S. Winslow's The Northern Reach is a breathtaking debut about the complexity of family, the cultural legacy of place, and the people and experiences that shape us.
W.S. Winslow was born and raised in Maine, but spent much of her working life in New York in corporate communications and marketing. A ninth-generation Mainer, she now lives most of the year in a small town Downeast. She received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in French from the University of Maine as well as an MFA from NYU. Her short fiction has appeared in Yemassee Journal and Bird’s Thumb.