Outermark

176-page paperback / 5.5" x 8.5" / ISBN 9781589881945Publication Date: 10/15/2024Outermark is a haunting and bittersweet story about the power of the places that shape us from Jason Brown, winner of the Maine Book Award, “a pure and accomplished talent” (New York Times). The tiny, fictional island of Outermark sits thirty miles off the coast in the waters between Maine and Nova Scotia. When Corson Wills, one of the last people to have lived on the island, is asked to recount its history, he begins by describing it as "a rock in the ocean where no one lives anymore.” Corson’s tale, and those of his ancestors who also lived there, ferry the reader between the 1980s, when lobster fishing is the only remaining industry, and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, days of great sailing ships to the East Indies but also of conflicts between the earliest Native residents and newly arrived colonial settlers. During Corson’s boyhood, life on the island becomes increasingly tenuous as the lobst