Libby Buck, "Port Anna" (Simon & Schuster, 2025)

After Gwin Gilmore loses her adjunct teaching job, mother, and boyfriend, she leaves the south and heads for the cottage she’s just inherited on the Maine coast. It’s in the town her family visited every summer, people still remember her, and she has some old friends there, but it’s also filled with terrible memories of her sister’s drowning. And the old houses are slowly giving way to ugly condos and mini mansions. Anna grapples with a teenage runaway, a realtor trying to condemn her cottage, a handsome artist, and the ghosts of previous tenants who make their presence known. This is a beautiful novel about overcoming past failures, finding a community, and moving forward.

Libby Buck earned her BA in English from the University of Virginia, her MA in art history from Columbia University, and PhD. in art history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While her general area of expertise is Nineteenth Century France, her dissertation focused upon the Gustave Moreau museum and its challenge to traditional museology. She taught as a visiting lecturer for over a decade at various institutions, including Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She and her husband raised three daughters in North Carolina, where she still lives with her husband when she is not beside the sea in Downeast Maine.

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