Alice Elliott Dark

Lifelong neighbors and friends Agnes Lee and Polly Garner own shares in Fellowship Point, a beautiful summer colony and bird sanctuary on the coast of Maine. As they turn 80, it’s time to make decisions about what will become of their legacy, a question that threatens their long, close, and peaceful friendship. Inspired by the breadth and drama of 19th century novels, this tour de force novel looks at the women’s lives, loves, families and work across the 20th century, finally rising to a shocking revelation that will lead to a surprising answer to the dilemma.

MAJOR REVIEWS

“Fellowship Point” is a novel rich with social and psychological insights, both earnest and sly, big ideas grounded in individual emotions, a portrait of a tightly knit community made up of artfully drawn, individual souls.” —Kate Christensen, The New York Times Book Review Full Review

“Some of the many miracles of this dense, bristling, multilayered work are its gut-level reality checks on modern sex, love, money, class, aging, and power. Yet though it fearlessly faces down topical problems (ecology, marriage, inequality) Fellowship Point remains compassionately complex, avoiding polemic, caricature, or infomercials. Its life is rooted in loyalty to humanness, to people so real you can see, hear, and smell them.” —Joan Frank, The Boston Globe Full Review

“It is hard to write about this novel without gushing. You sink into it with a sigh of contentment, as into a hot bath. Its characters, settings, and deftly woven plot pull you right in, the better to soak in its reflections on aging, writing, stewardship, legacies, independence, and responsibility. At its heart, Fellowship Point is about caring for the places and people we love.”—Heller McAlpin, The Christian Science Monitor Full Review

“Alice Elliott Dark’s beautiful, sprawling novel Fellowship Point is about land and stewardship, about nature and conservation, but more than that, it is a book of friendship across the decades and about the complexities of women’s lives, told in part by two extraordinary narrators who experienced nearly a century of life in the world.” —Midge Raymond, EcoLit Books

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MORE PRAISE

“I fell into Fellowship Point—fell in step and in love with its characters, with its landscape, with its ideas about art and marriage and, above all, friendship. It's a beautifully passionate book about what it means to love a place and to love all the people of your life, and how life itself is a riveting plot and deep mystery.” — Elizabeth McCracken, author of Bowlaway and The Souvenir Museum 

"I can’t remember the last time I’ve fallen so hard for a book. Fellowship Point is about many things: friendship, secrets, legacy, love, family—but the true magic here is in the writing. Alice Elliott Dark has conjured a world so immersive I can still feel it in my bones. I mourned the finish, when I would have to leave behind the characters I grew to love. This captivating, unforgettable novel is thrillingly good.” — Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, New York Times bestselling author of Nest and Good Company

"Fellowship Point is deeply relevant in its concerns—about the land, the creatures who inhabit it, and the legacies of ownership, stewardship, and friendship—but it’s also just a great, absorbing, and transformative read. Like a Maine glade, Dark’s book is filled with light." — Jo Ann Beard, author of Festival Days and Boys of My Youth

“I've just sat up nearly all night finishing Alice Elliott Dark's FELLOWSHIP POINT.  Dark took over a decade to craft this magnificent novel, and the result is an instant classic:  an epic tale of love, family,  friendship, literature, and the American landscape, laid out on the capacious scale of a nineteenth-century classic, yet effortlessly contemporary in its voice.  Tracing her story over decades and generations, Dark offers a portrayal of the complex inner worlds of three extraordinary women with an unerring insight that rivals that of Edith Wharton, or Elena Ferrante.  Replete with humor, irony, gimlet-eyed observation of social mores, and a deep underlying spirituality, it's a novel so immersive you don't just read it, but practically move into it, like one of the rambling, shingled summer "cottages" that come to life in its pages.  We readers emerge at the end with a deep nostalgia for the wind-battered pines, lingering ghosts, and imperiled eagles' nests of Dark's unforgettable Maine coast.” —Andrea Lee, author of Red Island House

 "Fellowship Point is a marvel. Intricately constructed, utterly unique, this novel set on the coast of Maine is filled with insights about writing, about the perils and freedoms of aging, about the great mysteries, as well as the pleasures, of life. The story about the relationships between three women unfolds, as life does, through joys and losses, confrontations and confessions, with twists along the way that change your perception of all that came before. This is a world is so closely and acutely observed that I felt I lived in it. I was sorry to leave." — Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Exiles and Orphan Train

“Fellowship Point is a miraculous generational saga. Alice Elliott Dark has drawn the desire lines between men and women, privilege and historical imperative, fated consequence and tragic accident.  Her surprising, consummate novel goes to the heart of relationship and redefines the term “soul mate” for these our confused, estranged times. Literature insists on hope: Fellowship Point will endure.” —Jayne Anne Phillips, author of Black Tickets, Machine Dreams, and Lark & Termite.

“I positively inhaled this novel--and then stingily meted out the last few pages, not wanting it to end. Fellowship Point is a marvel--masterfully executed, beautifully layered, huge-hearted and sharp-witted--and Alice Elliott Dark is a writer of great empathy and incredible skill.”—Claire Lombardo, author of The Most Fun We Ever Had

“Dark has the ruthless command of a shutdown ace, painting the corners effortlessly, backing you off the plate with an overwhelming heater, buckling your knees with a devastating curveball, and sending you back to the dugout muttering in disbelief at her power to stun you. This is a virtuosic performance, indisputably a work of genius, but even fervent adjectives can’t capture the almost numinous effect of reading these pages. In Fellowship Point, one feels oneself in the rare presence of the truly sublime, of literature forged in the smithy of a relentless artistic conscience. Every exactingly described gesture, every bit of inspired characterization, every gorgeous sentence is run through an obsessive mind grappling indefatigably with the weightiest materials: the powerful gravity of enduring relationships and the psychic costs of managing them; the sometimes crushing conflict between duty to self and responsibility to others; and the desperate urge to conserve a small corner of a stressed-out planet and defend a worthy way of life from extinction. The equal manner in which the past and present, like overlaid supersaturated transparencies, come so vividly to bloom in one book recalls the bottomless ambitions of the timeless greats—which is fitting, as Alice Elliott Dark is one of the best writers working in English today.”—Matt Thomas, author of We Are Not Ourselves

“I loved Fellowship Point so intensely and so tremendously, I’m struggling to find words that capture its brilliance. At once a rich, deeply felt investigation of female friendship and a bold novel of ideas, Fellowship Point offers the most profound pleasures. It reminded me of my favorite novels—those I return to, over and over—Great Expectations, Howards End, Middlemarch. I wanted to live inside it forever.” - Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year

“Alice Elliott Dark is a writer I’ve long admired. With the splendid, engrossing Fellowship Point she has written a novel that is both sweeping and intimate as it deftly explores friendship, class, and the tricky nature of time.”—Meg Wolitzer, author of The Female Persuasion and The Interestings.

“Dark celebrates women’s friendships and artistic mentorship in this expansive yet intimate novel. The families and their grudges and grievances fill a broad canvas, and within it Dark delves deeply into the relationships between Agnes and her work, humans and the land, mothers and children, and, most indelibly, the sustenance and joy provided by a long-held female friendship. It’s a remarkable achievement.”—Publisher’s Weekly, starred review

“A sweeping story of lifelong best friends from Philadelphia Quaker families who share a vacation spot and a moral exigency…the rare 592-page novel you'll be sorry to finish. You will surely want to read this book, but you may be able to use its essential wisdom right now: “There wasn’t time for withholding, not in this short life when you were only given to know a few people, and to have a true exchange with one or two.” Elegantly structured, beautifully written, and altogether diverting, with a powerful message about land ownership in America.”—Kirkus, starred review 

“Each of Dark’s captivating narrators is more than she seems, while the history of Fellowship Point is a microcosm of the conflict between human desires versus ecological viability. Capacious, psychologically fluent, funny, and intricately and meaningfully plotted, Dark’s novel of love, trauma, guilt, and justice explores women’s struggles, the devaluing of nature, and how stories are told and by whom.”—Donna Seamon, Booklist, starred review 

“At one point in Alice Elliott Dark’s marvelous second novel, a character says, “Howards End reminds me of Leeward Cottage.” Another character quickly responds: “I can see that. Except for the conflict about who will inherit it.” This short exchange wonderfully encapsulates the drama in Fellowship Point, whose intricate plot and precise prose sparkle like the waters off the Maine coast where the book is set. …Dark (Think of England) intended for this epic saga to resemble a classic 19th-century novel featuring female landowners instead of men, and it took her nearly 10 years to write. Such a long rollout seems appropriate for a story of this nature, and her exquisite craftsmanship shines throughout.…Reading this novel is a transportive experience, similar to spending a long, luxurious summer on the shores of a picturesque Maine peninsula. It’s full of memorable adventures, tense moments of family drama and opportunities for restorative contemplation. Through it all, Fellowship Point harkens back to one of Howards End’s big messages: “Only connect.”—Alice Cary, Bookpage, starred review