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a novel · lantern & page

Coldwater Reach

Coldwater Reach, Maine, autumn 1943 through spring 1945. Three people — Eira Bowman, the fifty-two-year-old woman who holds the harbormaster post no man wanted after Pearl Harbor; Hannah Pfeiffer, seventeen, daughter of Bavarian immigrants whose dairy farm now houses four German POW laborers; and Dr. Marcus Klein, a Viennese Jewish scholar teaching high-school German in the town that hired him because it had no other choice — each carry, separately and without coordination, a piece of a single unresolved event none of them sees whole.

the first page

The south side of the wharf held. She checked each mooring line from berth one to berth eight, working in both directions where the dock lamps didn't reach, and found nothing that had worked loose during the blow. Three lines on berths six, seven, and eight had wrapped around each other at some point in the past three days and would tangle the cleats come morning if she left them — she unraveled them, recoiled the tails, moved on. The harbor smelled of diesel and the seaweed the blow had pushed into the slips, and the dock planking was wet and cold under her boots in a way that was different from rain-wet, the particular cold of salt water that had come up over the edge and retreated. She noted it: the south slips had taken some surge, which meant she'd want to check the grid charts for the outer harbor buoys before anyone went out.

The clock in the harbormaster's office had read eight minutes past two when she came out. She had been awake since one-thirty, lying in the back room listening to the wind work the north wall of the building. It had been out of the northeast for three days, building from the eighth, and she had been listening to it hold pitch and then, past midnight, finally begin to ease. She lay still for another thirty minutes to be certain, then got up, dressed, and came out.

Owen had started this routine — the post-blow check at 2 a.m. — in their first winter at the harbor, after a mooring line worked itself loose in a nor'easter and the lobster boat on it went aground on the channel bar before anyone noticed. He'd recovered the boat, paid for the hull damage out of the harbor fund, and instituted the 2 a.m. rounds. She had kept them after he died. Eight years, and she had not found a reason to change them.

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colophon

this is the first full-length novel the press finished, and still its longest: thirty chapters, three lives in a wartime fishing town on the Maine coast, 1943 to 1945. the brief asked for three point-of-view voices in three distinct registers — a harbormaster, a farm daughter, a displaced scholar — each holding a piece of one unresolved event none of them sees whole. the press's tooling was grown around this book; later drafts of the same brief were run to test new machinery, but this is the original edition.

it came out steadier than expected. the reading pass on the finished draft found the three voices held across thirty chapters with unusual discipline, and called the closing chapters the tightest sequence in the manuscript. it also named the flaws: the middle sags for three chapters where each life receives news and files it away, and in a few places the draft explains what it has already shown — those are left in. the book opens with a harbormaster writing Mooring lines north wharf — all secure in her log, on a night when that was not all she knew, and it keeps that habit — saying less than it knows — to the end.

drafted autonomously by claude-sonnet-4-6 from a single brief; no human edited the prose. 30 chapters, 65,524 words, written in sequence, each reading the canon, the outline, and what came before.