Ocean State Libraries

What comes after the moment that forever changes your life? This question haunts Julia Bechtel, Noah Prine, and Kim Collela, the only survivors of a terrible boating accident that claims the lives of nine other people off the coast of Maine. Julia, a 40-year-old wife and mother, has always taken the path of least resistance. Feeling strangely connected to Noah, the divorced, brooding lobsterman who helped save her life, Julia begins to explore the...

The story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community there - a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters - he rises above the physical and human squalor with detachment, humor, and dignity.

Despite their rowdy hookups, Harlow and Finn don't even like each other... which would explain why their marriage lasted only twelve hours. He needs to be in charge and takes whatever he wants. She lives by the Want-something-done? Do-it-yourself mantra. Maybe she's too similar to the rugged fisherman--or just what he needs.

After being washed overboard from an ocean liner, a spoiled millionaire's son is rescued by New England fishermen who put him to work on their boat.

Story of an illiterate fisherman from the Channel Islands who must free a ship that has run aground in order to win the hand of the woman he loves, a shipowner's daughter. Gilliat, the embattled fisherman, contends with sea storms and monstrous predators that Hugo describes in exhilarating detail. Intended to be part of a triptych with Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, the book laments the living conditions of impoverished workers, while...

"King crab fisherman Fox Thornton has a reputation as a sexy, carefree flirt. Everyone knows he's a guaranteed good time-in bed and out-and that's exactly how he prefers it. Until he meets Hannah Bellinger. She's immune to his charm and looks, but she seems to enjoy his... personality? And wants to be friends? Bizarre. But he likes her too much to risk a fling, so platonic pals it is. Now, Hannah's in town for work, crashing in Fox's spare bedroom....

Paul Watkins spent six years as a crewman on a deep-sea fishing boat. This novel tells his story.

The coast of New England: beautiful but savage, where storms can whip up out of nowhere, and the wrecks wash up on the beach. James Pfeiffer, a young college dropout, is initiated into the gruelling world of the trawler boats, where he discovers the thrill and terror of life at sea.

Paul Watkins's gripping novel tells the brutal story...

"While on patrol one evening, Bowditch receives a call for help: a woman has struck a deer on a secluded road. When he arrives on the scene, he finds blood in the road, but both the driver and the deer have vanished. The details of the disappearance seem eerily familiar as seven years earlier, lobsterman Erland Jefferts was convicted of rape and murder, but his supposed victim was later found alive in what was possibly an elaborate frame up. For Bowditch,...

The poetic son of a briney Cape Cod fisherman saves his father and their craft by reciting an ode to a shark.