Fellowship Point

The masterful story of a lifelong friendship between two very different women with shared histories and buried secrets,tested in the twilight of their livesset across the arc of the 20th century. Celebrated children’s book author Agnes Lee is determined to secure her legacy–to complete what she knows will be the final volume of her pseudonymously written Franklin Square novels; and even more consumingto permanently protect the peninsula of majestic coast in Maine known as Fellowship Point. To donate the land to a trustAgnes must convince shareholders to dissolve a generations-old partnership. And one of those shareholders is her best friendPolly. Polly Wister has led a different kind of life than Agnes: that of a well-off married woman with childrendefined by her devotion to her husbandand philosophy professor with an inflated sense of stature. She exalts in creating beauty and harmony in her homein her friendshipsand in her family. Polly soon finds her loyalties torn between the wishes of her best friend and the wishes of her three sons–but what is it that Polly wants herself? Agnes’s designs are further muddied when an enterprising young book editor named Maud Silver sets out to convince Agnes to write her memoirs. Agnes’s resistance cannot prevent long-buried memories and secrets from coming to light with far-reaching repercussions for all. Fellowship Point reads like a classic 19th-century novel in its beautifully wovenmultilayered narrativebut it is entirely contemporary in the themes it explores; a deep and empathic interest in women’s livesthe class differences that divided usthe struggle to protect the natural worldandabove alla reckoning with intimacyhistoryand posterity. It is a masterwork from Alice Elliott Dark.