About the Books

Snow Island
Snow Island is the story of two strangers who inhabit the same remote island off the New England coast. Sixteen-year-old Alice Daggett still feels the presence of her father who died five years earlier while she shoulders the responsibility for keeping the family store running. George Tibbits, a loner in his forties and the owner of the island's twin houses, returns each year in an act of homage to the women who raised him there. While George struggles to make peace with his troubled past and Alice befriends the twenty-six-year-old who tends the island lighthouse, both characters learn the hard lesson of what it means to love. This tender tale about the power of place and memory plumbs the depths of two unique and uncharted lives. As the country is drawn into World War II, George and Alice find their fates shaped by events that occur far from the small Rhode Island community that defines them.

Praise for Snow Island

Snow Island was chosen as a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers title, a Borders Original Voices title, and an Indiebound selection, the list of recommended titles from independent booksellers across the country.

"Luminous and moving." — The Boston Globe

"An evocative tale... The carefully chosen, and ultimately spare, language of Snow Island belies its quiet emotional wallop." — The Denver Post

"An elegant novel... Katherine Towler creates an engrossing atmosphere that feels true to its time and place." — Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale)

"Towler's characters are as complex and contradictory as those with whom we live our lives... A master of pacing, [she] accomplishes the higher art of bringing us to see the drama in the commonplace." — Donald M. Murray, columnist for The Boston Globe and author of My Twice-Lived Life

"Lovely... This is the perfect novel to curl up with on a winter's night... and then share with a friend." — Ann LaFarge, syndicated reviewer

"Captures the complicated emotions of falling in love for the first time." — The Dallas Morning News

"Slow cooking shows in the plausibility of the story, the vividness of the scenes, the depth of her characters, and the poetry of her language... a really fine novel." — The Portsmouth Herald

"Graceful... Towler's strength is her deft rendering of time and place. Lyrical and gentle, Alice's wartime coming-of-age - and the island itself - continues to resonate after the last page." — Publishers Weekly

"Towler's first novel adeptly personifies loneliness in the self-imposed exile of George Tibbits and the circumstantial solitude of Alice Daggett, both of whom are bonded by a common need for the isolated shores of Snow Island." — Booklist

Evening Ferry
Following the success of Snow Island, Katherine Towler returns to the fictional New England island with Evening Ferry — the second installment of the multigenerational trilogy about family bonds, unexpected love, and the threat of war. Thirty-two-year-old Rachel Shattuck grew up on Snow Island but left at the age of eighteen, anxious to escape the confines of the isolated community. Living on the mainland, just a short ferry ride away from Snow, she struggles to adjust to being divorced while grieving the recent death of her mother. In the summer of 1965, she returns to Snow Island to care for her injured father and discovers her mother's diaries hidden in a closet. Reading Phoebe Shattuck's account of her life as a wife and a mother, Rachel learns the truth about her family's history, her mother's death, and her own aspirations to lead a new life. In elegant prose and inspired storytelling, Towler gives us a moving portrait of two women and the island they come to call home, at a time when the world is changing, and the country faces war once again.

Praise for Evening Ferry

Evening Ferry was an Indiebound selection.

"Readers familiar with Snow Island, Katherine Towler's fine first novel, will be further delighted by her return to those hardscrabble New England waterfolk in Evening Ferry: a strong and deeply satisfying tale of the islanders' lives, loves, and losses from the Great Depression of the 1930s to America's war in Vietnam. Readers new to Towler's fiction have a happy discovery awaiting them." — John Barth, author of The Sot-Weed Factor and The Book of Ten Nights and a Night

"[Towler] imagines characters and an island life that feel remarkably real. Inner quandaries over love, sex, memories, dreams and codes of duty are rendered with a light but vivid elegance... by intertwining each era's history and cultural shifts with the stories of individual islanders, Towler is creating a memorable regional trilogy." — The Providence Journal

"When one is held in place by the past, the only way to move life forward is to find a way to break those chains. It is such a journey that Katherine Towler places at the center of Evening Ferry. Evening Ferry succeeds in part because the characters tell an interesting story, but also because of the way the novel takes the reader to a world far removed from present experience." — The Denver Post

"Towler's two books, with their overlapping characters and philosophies, interlock neatly, like pieces of a larger jigsaw already fully imagined... a compelling achievement." — Boston Globe

"Poignant... In a country deeply divided by the Vietnam conflict, Evening Ferry is the calm before the storm." — Curledup.com

"Towler succeeds in bringing the small island community to vivid life... gracefully written." — Publishers Weekly

"Evening Ferry is a moving, human story, and Towler is a powerful, brave new writer." — Hippo Press, Manchester, NH

"Evening Ferry grips readers, beginning to end, with a gradual revealing of hard and sometimes redeeming truths about characters we truly care about." — The Concord Monitor

"The arc of the main characters' lives provide puzzles and also the pieces you need, in the end, to find closure. Evening Ferry has strong characters and surprises. Its sense of place is seductive." — Fosters Daily Democrat

"Evening Ferry offers readers a luminous and deeply moving journey back to the fictional Snow Island, the title of Towler's first book... a rich and satisfying foray into another world." — The Cape Codder

"Towler brings a strong sense of place, exquisite pacing and deft characterization to the quahoggers and others whose isolated lives depend on the sea." — Mystic River Press

Island Light
In the fall of 1990, the Snow Island community includes a Vietnam veteran, an aging lesbian, and a photographer seeking to redefine herself and her art, an unlikely trio who find their lives unexpectedly linked.

Though the island remains a world away from the mainland, it is not immune to the effects of war. Old wounds and new uncertainties come to the surface as the United States prepares to go to war again, this time in the Persian Gulf. In the silence of a New England winter, former residents and prodigal wanderers return to Snow Island in search of refuge from wars both private and public. Through a rich collection of characters and a tightly-woven story, Island Light traces a path from the scars of the past to the promise of the future. This taut tale of love and perseverance evokes the isolation and connection at the heart of every community.