The Maytrees - Softcover

'A beautiful, unstinting contemplation of mortality...turn back to the start and wallow in very word.' --The Guardian

'We all know that truth can be stranger than fiction: it is one of the challenges of fiction to persuade us that lives really might be lived and experienced in other ways. The vividness of Dillard's initial portrayal of the Maytrees' intimacy makes the shiftings of their hearts all the more startling.' --The Spectator

'A shimmering meditation on the ebb and flow of love ... the last line of 'The Maytrees' is so lovely that it may send you right back to the book s beginning.' --New York Times

It began when Lou Bigelow and Toby Maytree first met. He was back home in Provincetown after the war. Maytree first saw her on a bicycle. A red scarf, white shirt, skin clean as eggshell, wide eyes and mouth, shorts. She stopped and leaned on a leg to talk to someone on the street. She laughed, and her loveliness caught his breath. In 1940s Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod, poet Toby Maytree falls in love with Lou Bigelow at first sight. His slow courtship gradually wins her over, and so begins a love story that lasts decades. Surrounded by bohemian friends, living in Toby's shack on the dunes, the two marry, have a child. But when a friend first comes between them, then unexpectedly propels them back into one another's lives, they must each renegotiate what it means to love.