Verwandte Artikel zu Gull Island: A Novel

Gull Island: A Novel - Softcover

Porter, Anna

 
9781668017708: Gull Island: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1668017709 ISBN 13: 9781668017708
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

A haunting psychological suspense novel about a young woman who visits her remote family cottage seeking answers to a murky past—for fans of Catherine McKenzie and Amber Cowie.

When her estranged father goes missing, Jude is persuaded by her mother to find his will. She travels to the family cottage on remote Gull Island, glad to be away from the city and to have the chance to sort through old memories, but is unsettled by what she finds there.

While contending with the neglected cottage and encroaching wild animals, Jude looks not only for her father’s will, but also for photographs of herself as a baby, desperate for proof that she was loved as a child. However, loneliness and terrifying dreams soon wear on her, bringing back frightening memories. Thoughts of her distant mother and intimidating father, her jealous sister, and her mother’s mysterious friend infest Jude’s increasingly clouded mind.

Then a fierce storm sweeps away her boat and severs her from the outside world. Forced to reckon with long-buried truths and filled with the terrible sense that the cottage may be haunted by more than the past, Jude begins to fear for her sanity—and her life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anna Porter is the award-winning author of ten books, both fiction and nonfiction, most recently Deceptions and In Other Words: How I Fell in Love with Canada One Book at a Time. She has written five mystery novels, including The Appraisal, which was shortlisted for the Staunch Book Prize, and Mortal Sins. Kasztner’s Train won the 2007 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and Ghosts of Europe won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. She cofounded Key Porter Books, an influential publishing house she ran for more than twenty years. In addition, she writes book reviews, opinion pieces, and stuff. She is an Officer of the Order of Canada and has received the Order of Ontario. Visit her at AnnaPorter.ca or connect with her on Twitter @AnnaPorter_Anna.

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Chapter 1 1
I HAD DRIVEN UP FAST. When I set out from the city, it was still dark. There were not many cars on the highway. Dawn breaking as I turned off the 400. No one had removed the dead animals from the side road to Honey Harbour yet. There was a young raccoon, bloody teeth bared, its chest squashed, arms pawing the air, and a large snapper, its house smashed, its guts strewn across the road. Too much night traffic. But not even one car now.

It was quiet at the marina. I couldn’t see the Limestone, though that was usually the boat they took out of winter storage first. The Hunt, a much smaller boat, had been left for me at the main loading dock. There was no one else at the docks, at the pump, or on the veranda of Jim’s cottage. Perhaps the guys who ran the place for him had been told to take the rest of the week off. They were usually cheerful and friendly, offering to haul the bags to the boat, making rude comments about my city garb, offering to come and keep me company in the evening while I waited for the rest of our family to arrive. I was not used to silence at the marina.

When I headed out, it seemed to me that the Hunt was the only boat on the lake. Perhaps April was too early for other people to be this far north. There was a chill in the air. The ice had barely gone out, and the birds that wintered in the South had not yet arrived. When my hand touched the water as I tied the boat up to our dock, it felt painfully cold.

The cottage, too, was strangely quiet. In the old days it had always been noisy. Kids running and shouting, Gina doing her ridiculous exercises on the dock, country music or opera wailing away inside, the men chopping wood or repairing the roof, or moving rocks to make an easier path into the water. Sammy had been quite useful, then, and James, to my surprise, had fitted in with the rest of the family. Years ago, there used to be a lot of bellowing and even some laughter. My mother would try to relax, read, or give strident orders to complete some task we had been putting off. The last time I was here, though, there had already been too much silence. Since I hadn’t come to the cottage often then, when I did, I was aware of the overall gloom, the sadness that had settled on the place. Mother spent most of the time in her room, gazing at the birdfeeders, her book lying unread on the bed. She left all the cooking to Gina and me. I knew I couldn’t face the ghosts of summers past.

I carried my bags up to the deck—I had brought up only two bottles of wine, because I hadn’t expected to stay long—and placed them carefully at the glass doors while I hunted for the key.

It wasn’t under the small rock where we usually hid it after we locked up at the end of the season. Hardly surprising, given the winter snowdrifts, the strong winds that had blown down some of our roof tiles and broken branches off our one remaining ash tree. While I scrabbled around among the musty, dead leaves, I thought I heard something scuttling toward the cabins. Maybe a squirrel or a chipmunk, but I saw nothing when I stood up. Still no key. I searched under the steps, no key, and nothing on the big nail where Gina preferred to hang it.

We had fought about that.

We did not have the warmest relationship, my sister and I, but we rarely engaged in open combat. It was more of a standoff. We knew each other too well for prolonged battles, but toward the end of that gloomy summer two years ago, we had allowed ourselves to express the anger we both felt—at least, I know I felt—but had kept under control. I found it oddly liberating. We argued about a whole lot of subjects we had avoided before. Mother’s choice of a condo and how long she would be able to stay there, Scoop’s ashes, Father’s mansion, Gladys, Eva, and why she kept showing up (Gina was sure that she still hankered after our father, and I was equally sure that she was secretly gay and in love with our mother). Gina suggested once that Eva had something on our parents, a secret they didn’t want her to reveal. (I thought that was ridiculous; if she had some sort of hold over them, she would cash it in, not take it in time spent at the cottage.) We argued even about little things like cleaning the place and who left dishes out the last time. Everything except William. I stayed quiet when she talked about him.

The fight over the placement of the cottage key was one of our nastiest, and it ended by not ending. It started with each of us explaining our different positions—me saying the key had to be in a place where no one could easily find it, Gina saying that everyone put keys under rocks and that our mother preferred the nail option. I viewed bringing our mother into the discussion an unfair thrust and parried with a variety of instances of my sister’s ignoring our mother’s wishes. From there, the fight escalated.

Given that we had grown up together, we both had a veritable smorgasbord of each other’s failings to choose from when we decided to be nasty. These days, our fights veered off into mutual accusations of indifference to Mother’s needs, then on to the familiar grounds of sibling rivalry over holiday plans (whose plans had most inconvenienced the others) and selfish or inconsiderate choices of long ago. I brought up her failing to show up at our mother’s bedside when she had been ill a few years ago. Unusual for Mother, she had asked for some help with her shopping. But, as was usual with our mother, the shopping wasn’t what she had meant. For reasons that hadn’t yet been obvious, she had become afraid of being alone at night.

She had been proud of her independence. She not only didn’t ask for help, but she also rejected all offers of assistance—and that attitude was still there that winter, three years ago. She insisted on doing her own Christmas shopping with only Nellie’s help and ignored our, I thought unanimous, decision to reduce the volume of gifts and the attendant headaches. We would each buy a present for just one person, drawing a name out of a hat. She wanted to buy gifts for everybody.

Gina said that it was a ruse. One of our mother’s completely unnecessary ways to show affection and demand, by implication, the same in return. I thought it was her basic insecurity, her feeling that unless she continued to earn respect and admiration, she would cease to matter. As she once described it to me, if you are no longer who you have persuaded yourself you are, then you are no one, a nonperson. That remark had been in response to my suggestion, long before her diagnosis, that she needed a break from her endless schedules, that she could allow herself time to relax.

Back then, she had been a respected academic, a sought-after public speaker. A couple of years later, she was still able to deliver her Current Affairs Lecture at Trinity College, yet she persisted in repeatedly proving her own relevance. She worried that she had been supplanted by other, more effective, or worse, younger speakers.

Perhaps it was her form of blackmailing everyone into appreciating what she did. An extreme case of impostor syndrome. Or a reasonable dread that her failing memory was no longer a secret.

Naturally, no one would ask Mother whether Gina’s contention about her preference for key placement had been correct. Gina had mentioned several times during that winter her amazement that I had managed to be invited to give readings throughout the month and that all my readings were far from home, so Gina must have had her...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668017709
ISBN 13 
9781668017708
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande