The Cottage at Glass Beach
by Heather Barbieri

Married to the youngest attorney general in Massachusetts state history, Nora Cunningham is a picture-perfect political wife and a doting mother. But her carefully constructed life falls to pieces when she, along with the rest of the world, learns of the infidelity of her husband, Malcolm. Humiliated and hounded by the press, Nora packs up her daughters—Annie, seven; and Ella, twelve—and takes refuge on Burke’s Island, off the coast of Maine. Nora hasn’t been back to the remote, Irish-American community for decades— not since that long ago summer when her mother disappeared at sea. Just as she begins to regain her balance, her daughters embark on a reckless odyssey of their own—a journey that will force Nora to find the courage to chart her own course and finally face the truth about her marriage, her mother, and her long-buried past.

Praise & Reviews

“A wonderful, subtle, transporting story.”
Booklist (starred review)

“In the enchanting world of Maine’s Burke’s Island, fanciful stories—of captured selkies becoming dutiful wives and tears cried in the sea beckoning lovers to shore—are gracefully woven into modern reality.”
Publisher’s Weekly

The Cottage at Glass Beach, an enchanting novel about mothers and daughters on an isolated island, is a romantic, delicious read. Barbieri’s beautiful writing and beguiling worldview revel in the realities and the mysteries of the sea and of life itself.”
—Nancy Thayer, New York Times bestselling author of Heat Wave

The Cottage at Glass Beach is part seaside fairy tale, part sensitive exploration of very real-world tensions: those between mother and daughter, husband and wife, past and present. Let yourself be transported along with Nora and her children to Burke’s island, a salt-tinged place steeped in legends of selkies and shipwrecks, but also full of bruised and hopeful people making their wayward, human ways toward happiness.”
—Marisa de los Santos, New York Times bestselling author of Falling Together and Belong to Me

“Heather Barbieri’s The Cottage at Glass Beach is a moving, heartfelt story told with vivid description. Open the book and listen—you’ll hear the waves crashing onto the shore.”
—Sarah Jio, author of The Bungalow and The Violets of March