Sometimes an Island

After Cossacks burn their home, ten-year-old Deborah and her father flee their shtetl to a remote island on Maine's Penobscot Bay, seeking refuge and a new beginning. More than a century later, their descendants are once again uprooted, this time driven by rising seas and a collapsing world. From coastal towns to higher ground, a new community emerges: off-grid, tightly knit, and forged from an unlikely alliance of island refugees, family from Brooklyn, friends from a fractured Massachusetts co-op, and others seeking sanctuary as the political landscape grows increasingly volatile.

Ellen Meeropol is the author of the previous novels The Lost Women of Azalea Court, Her Sister's Tattoo, Kinship of Clover, On Hurricane Island, and House Arrest, and the play Gridlock. She is the guest editor for the anthology Dreams for a Broken World. Essay and story publications include Ms. Magazine, Lilith, The Writer Magazine, The Boston Globe, Solstice Magazine, Guernica, Lit Hub, and Mom Egg Review. Her work focuses on the lives of women, especially those on the fault lines between political activism and family, and has been a finalist for the Sarton Women's Prize, longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award, and selected by the Women's National Book Association as a Great Group Reads.Ellen lives in western Massachusetts, where she is a founding mother of Straw Dog Writers Guild.