Tells the story of sixteen-year-old Alice Daggett, haunted by the death of her father and the responsibility of running the family store, and the other inhabitants of a remote island in Narragansett Bay off the New England coast during World War II. Reader's Guide available. Reprint.

Snow Island

Literature & Fiction

Towler, Katherine

Genre Fiction

Plume

On Snow Island, a remote community off the New England coast, sixteen-year-old Alice Daggett struggles to come to terms with her father's death while managing the family store. George Tibbits, a loner in his forties and owner of the island's twin houses, returns each year in an act of homage to the women who raised him there. While George tries to make peace with his troubled past and Alice befriends the twenty-six-year-old who tends the island lighthouse, both characters learn the hard lesson of what it means to love. This tender tale about the power of place and memory plumbs the depths of two unique and uncharted lives. As the country is drawn into World War II, George and Alice find their fates shaped by events that occur far from the island home that defines them.

Snow Island (Tenth Anniversary Edition)

Literary

RiverRun Select

Katherine Towler returns to Snow Island with "Evening Ferry" - the second installment of her multigenerational trilogy about family bonds, unexpected love, and the threat of war. Thirty-two-year-old Rachel Shattuck grew up on Snow Island but left at the age of eighteen, anxious to escape the confines of the isolated community. Living on the mainland, just a short ferry ride away from Snow, she struggles to adjust to being divorced while grieving the recent death of her mother. In the summer of 1965, she returns to Snow Island to care for her injured father and discovers her mother's diaries hidden in a closet. Reading Phoebe Shattuck's account of her life as a wife and a mother, Rachel learns the truth about her family's history, her mother's death, and her own aspirations to lead a new life. In elegant prose and inspired storytelling, Towler gives us a moving portrait of two women and the island they come to call home, at a time when the world is changing, and the country faces war once again.

Evening Ferry

Island Light

Nick Daggett, a Vietnam veteran in his early forties, has returned to Snow Island to live year-round and run a pirate radio station from the abandoned mansion. Nora Venable, a lesbian in her seventies and owner of the decaying mansion, comes to the island after a fifty-year absence and decides to stay. Ruth Lambert, a photographer from New York, arrives to see what is left of the old Snow Inn, which she has inherited from her aunt. This unlikely trio finds their lives unexpectedly linked after a fire sweeps through the old mansion. Set in the fall of 1990, as the United States prepares to go to war in the Persian Gulf, the final volume of the Snow Island trilogy (after Snow Island and Evening Ferry) brings together characters from the previous volumes with new arrivals in a moving conclusion that completes the saga of island life. This taut tale of love and perseverance evokes the isolation and connection at the heart of every community.

Contemporary

On Snow Island, a remote community off the New England coast, sixteen-year-old Alice Daggett struggles to come to terms with her father's death while managing the family store. George Tibbits, a loner in his forties and owner of the island's twin houses, returns each year in an act of homage to the women who raised him there. While George tries to make peace with his troubled past and Alice befriends the twenty-six-year-old who tends the island lighthouse, both characters learn the hard lesson of what it means to love. This tender tale about the power of place and memory plumbs the depths of two unique and uncharted lives. As the country is drawn into World War II, George and Alice find their fates shaped by events that occur far from the island home that defines them.

Snow Island (Beeler Large Print Series)

Thomas T. Beeler

Following on from the success of Snow Island, Katherine Towler returns to the fictional island with the second installment of this trilogy. 
Thirty-two year old Rachel Shattuck has not returned to Snow Island since she attended her mother’s funeral. A year later, in the summer of 1965, she remains frightened of what she will confront at home: her mother’s absence, her father’s stern nature, and the unrealized promise of her own life now that she is divorced. 
When she returns to Snow Island to care for her father after he is injured in an accident, she discovers her mother’s diaries, hidden in the house where she died a year earlier. What Rachel learns through reading her mother’s diary and becoming an islander once again reveals the truth about her family’s history and sets her own troubled life on a new course.

United States

MACADAM/CAGE.

Lawson Library

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth is a memoir of the author’s friendship with Robert Dunn, a brilliant poet who spent most of his life off the grid in downtown Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The book is as well an elegy for a time and place―the New England seaport city of the early 1990s that has been lost to development and gentrification, capturing the life Robert was able to make in a place rougher around the edges than it is today. It is a meditation on what writing asks of those who practice it and on the nature of solitude in a culture filled with noise and clutter.

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth: A Memoir Of Place, Solitude, and Friendship

Parenting & Relationships

Counterpoint

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth: A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship

What is life like for a girl coming of age in the shadow of World War II, a girl who lives on a small, isolated island populated by quahoggers and eccentrics? 
This tender first novel follows the fate of sixteen-year-old Alice Daggett, who still feels the presence of her father who died six years earlier, and of George Tibbit, a reclusive loner who returns to the island each year in an excessive act of homage to the two women who raised him there. 
Snow Island tells of their isolated lives and the impact that WWII has on all of their worlds. Both Alice and George find their lives linked, and changed, forever by the events that happen far from the small New England community that defines them.

MacMurray & Beck

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Towler, Katherine. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Towler, Katherine

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Towler, Katherine. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Snow Island

Snow Island (Tenth Anniversary Edition)

Evening Ferry

Island Light

Snow Island (Beeler Large Print Series)

Evening Ferry

Evening Ferry

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth: A Memoir Of Place, Solitude, and Friendship

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth: A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship

Snow Island