2024/064: Coastliners — Joanne Harris

2024/064: Coastliners — Joanne Harris

‘We should be fighting the sea, not each other. We should be thinking of our families. Dead’s dead; but everything returns. If you let it.’ [p. 191]

After her mother's death in Paris, artist Mado Prasteau returns to Le Devin, the tiny island where she grew up and where her taciturn father -- known as GrosJean -- still lives. Mado has a love-hate relationship with her father, who has never answered any of her letters: she also has a love-hate relationship with her childhood home, the hamlet of Les Salants. It's only a few miles from the much more prosperous La Houssinière, where her sister's husband's uncle M. Brismand grows wealthy on the income from tourists and from the retirement home he'd like GrosJean to move into. Mado's sister Adrienne (mostly absent) agrees. But Mado doesn't want her father to be thus diminished -- and, together with mysterious drifter Flynn (who's living in an abandoned WW2 blockhouse) she hatches a scheme to restore Les Salants to its former prosperity.

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