Amagansett Hardback - 2004

by Mills, Mark

A major debut novel that tells a mesmerizing story of love, death, and redemption in a small Long Island fishing community in 1947.

Amagansett is a novel as sweeping and haunting as the landscape of sky and sea it evokes. Beautifully and powerfully told, it announces the arrival of a gifted writer who skillfully weaves together a delicate love story, a brutal murder, an unforgettable evocation of a place and time, and characters shaped by the epic forces of nature, class, war, and memory.

Conrad Labarde is a first-generation Basque fisherman who casts his nets in the treacherous waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Living alone among the high dunes on the east end of Long Island, he is kept company only by the ghosts of war. He is a working-class man in a region sharply divided between those who farm and fish this isolated finger of land year-round, and the wealthy, who claim it every summer for seaside escape.

But in postwar America, the landscape is changing quickly. And lives, too, will change dramatically when Conrad's nets pull in the body of a beautiful young woman, seaweed twined in her hair. Deputy Chief of Police Tom Hollis must traverse the shoals of class and community in order to determine if a crime has been committed and, if so, by whom. From the privileged family whose dead daughter was hiding a torturous secret, to the determined cop who seeks the truth, to the fisherman who is always one step ahead of him-they, and everyone else in Amagansett-will be touched by what the waves cast up that day.