Vendor
	Fletcher Agency Yona Levin
Original language
English

PETE AND ALICE IN MAINE

Caitlin Shetterly

A powerful and beautifully written debut novel that intimately explores a fractured marriage and the struggles of parenthood against the backdrop of the challenges of Spring 2020.

After a recent betrayal in her marriage, and as the pandemic takes hold in New York, Alice packs up her family and flees the city for their second home in Maine, hopeful that it will provide sanctuary—from the uncertainty of the pandemic, and from the uncertainties of her faltering marriage. Sheltering there, she feels safer, but locals feel otherwise about the arrival of outsiders, like Alice and her family.

Even as the family finds themselves in forced quarantine after hostile neighbors block their driveway with felled trees, Alice wonders if this is not the only way she is trapped. Stripped down to the bare essentials of survival and tending to the needs of her two children, Alice is forced to face all the ways in which she feels stuck and lost. Lost in the big city, lost as a wife, lost as a mother, lost as a person. As the world shifts around them and the balance shifts within their marriage, Pete and Alice must consider if what keeps their family safe is the same thing as what keeps their family together.

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Book Published 2023-04-01 by Harper

Comments

"When we first meet the title characters of Caitlin Shetterly’s gripping novel Pete & Alice in Maine, they’re fleeing pandemic ravaged New York with their children for the relative safety of their second home. How satisfying it would be in this age of easy social media judgment to despise them for their privilege. The only thing preventing it, really, is that this very fine novel -- like all good novels -- insists upon getting to know them. I loved it.”

-- Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls

"In this taut, riveting novel, Shetterly has created a lush, raw world: a passionate and damaged marriage; a family coming apart and knitting back together during a pandemic; a starkly unwelcoming place that becomes home. In all its multi-layered emotional facets, this book cuts deep, moving and true to the end."

-- Kate Christensen, PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of The Great Man

“This is the novel I’ve been waiting to read. Caitlin Shetterly’s brilliant take on what happens when the worst happens to a couple days before the pandemic locks them together is simply fabulous. Funny and fierce, compassionate and uncompromising – I could continue pairing complimentary adjectives forever – best just to buy it and clear a weekend. You won’t want to put it down.”

-- Karen Karbo, author of The Gospel According to Coco Chanel

"This novel has its thumb on the pulse of our times, the pandemic and all its costs and upheavals, our political and social fault lines, climate change as we try to raise children into a new world. Yet it is, at heart, a familiar and intimate story of a marriage and a family struggling within its own universe of hurt and betrayal. Shetterly refuses to offer easy answers in this powerful, beautifully written novel."

-- Meredith Hall, author of the bestselling memoir Without A Map and the novel Beneficence

"What literature is going to come out of the present moment? How do things look from where we are right now? Caitlin Shetterly's Pete and Alice in Maine is one answer. A comfortable New Yorker and her family escape the city during the pandemic, but all is not well. Always sensitive, Alice is struggling with her husband's recent affair, Mainers' angry reaction to her presence in their state, co-parenting, and her former professional life, as well as that most basic desire to be a good person, even as the disasters of the time come to her largely through news reports. She means to reckon with the racism in her own family, but what does that even mean in a time such as this? Voice-driven, relatable, and very contemporary, this novel is a beautifully-written depiction of the inner lives of a small family and the land to which they briefly escape."

-- Debra Spark, author of The Pretty Girl and Breaking Bread

“Rarely is a fictional voice so intimate, honest, and revealing. Alice's carefully created family life is interrupted and her consequent fears are described with deep intelligence in exquisite sentences. I loved this book!

-- Alice Elliott Dark, author of Fellowship Point and In the Gloaming