Stern Men - Softcover

'Finding an Austen heroine in a lobster boat - an irreverent and observant young woman, reeking of bait - is one of many delights delivered by Elizabeth Gilbert in Stern Men, her beautifully wrought and very funny novel' Mirabella 'Ruth loves her island with a heroine's passionate wisdom, but she falls in love with a boy from the enemy island, the enemy clan... There's Romeo and Juliet in the drama of the young lovers' Los Angeles Times 'Elizabeth Gilbert has been described by Annie Proulx as a "writer of incandescent talent". She justifies this assessment in Stern Men... Gilbert's poise in constructing a plot and her feeling for her characters make it a worthy successor to Pilgrims which won a series of first-fiction awards' Glasgow Herald

On two remote islands off the coast of Maine - Courne Haven and Fort Niles - generations of local lobstermen have fought each other over who has the right to fish the waters that divide them. Their unlikely saviour is eighteen-year-old Ruth Thomas, a smart, resilient, irredeemably romantic woman who avoids her destiny with a passion that serves only to draw it closer to her. 'Finding an Austen heroine in a lobster boat - an irreverent and observant young woman, reeking of bait - is one of many delights delivered by Elizabeth Gilbert in Stern Men, her beautifully wrought and very funny novel' Mirabella 'Ruth loves her island with a heroine's passionate wisdom, but she falls in love with a boy from the enemy island, the enemy clan . . . There's Romeo and Juliet in the drama of the young lovers' Los Angeles Times 'Elizabeth Gilbert has been described by Annie Proulx as a "writer of incandescent talent". She justifies this assessment in Stern Men . . . Gilbert's poise in constructing a plot and her feeling for her characters make it a worthy successor to Pilgrims which won a series of first-fiction awards' Glasgow Herald