Toward the End

Crow Point was the loveliest of the five points gracing Jacataqua Island off Maine's picturesque coast. But that did not explain why the summer people-who usually packed up and went home-decided to winter over one season. Their reasons were as varied as their personalities. Natives and newcomers exchange pleasantries at the post office, debate at the town meeting, and sparred at cocktail parties. Alliances shift and forge, hostilities grown and recede as autumn slips into a brutal winter. When a fierce southeaster ravages the coast, the community survives it relatively unscathed, and the townspeople momentarily band together in their triumph over disaster. But a cataclysmic second storm shatters their complacence, irreversibly altering each of their lives. Recalling the events surrounding the Great Blizzard of 1978 that battered the Eastern seaboard, Toward The End sets the daily dramas of the townspeople's comfortable, sequestered lives against the headlong invasion of a seemingly benign, suddenly obliterating sea. Drawing the characters with all her skill as an experienced, sympathetic observer of human nature, Elizabeth Savage has written a powerful novel about love, loss, and survival.