Miriam Colwell
Location: Prospect Harbor, Maine
Islandport Press:
Contentment Cove
BY: Miriam Colwell
ABOUT THE BOOK: Miriam Colwell's Contentment Cove – her fourth novel set in Maine and her first in more than five decades – is a riveting story of class distinctions in a 1950s Down East coastal village during a time of cultural change.
Meet Dot-Fran, Hilary, and Mina, three residents of a Maine coastal village in the 1950s. Dot-Fran, the youngest, is a native; she runs the town's drug store. Hilary, middle-aged, is a worldly artist. The wealthy Mina and her husband retired to the town after being enchanted with its charm during a one-night visit. Their disparate lives become entwined and eventually clash tragically.
The story – which features recognizable "Maine" characters as well as those "from away" – takes place over only a matter of days one summer.
And while Maine-native Colwell infuses Contentment Cove with humor, it is nonetheless a novel that deals with serious issues that remain relevant today, none more compelling than the erosion of one way of Maine life and the evolution of another.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Miriam Colwell was born in Prospect Harbor in 1917 and still lives in the house built by her great-great-great grandfather in 1817. Colwell also wrote Wind off the Water (1945), Day of the Trumpet (1947) and Young (1955). Those novels earned her attention at the time and prompted The Puckerbrush Review to write recently, "Everyone who wants to get acquainted with the whole body of Maine literature in the twentieth century should read Miriam Colwell." As a resident and long-time postmistress she has watched change upon change wash over the fabled coast for nearly nine decades. She explores those themes in her fourth novel, Contentment Cove, which is set in a Down East coastal village in the 1950s when social clashes and changing values were starting to tear at the fabric of Maine's traditional way of life.
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