The House on Salt Hay Road

In Depression-era Long Island, a multigenerational family faces both natural and personal disasters in this "elegant debut" novel ( Kirkus Reviews). When a fireworks factory explodes in a quiet seaside town, twelve-year-old Clay Poole is thrilled by the hole it's blown in everyday life. His older sister, Nancy, is more interested in the striking stranger who appears, dusted with ashes, in the explosion's aftermath. The Pooles—taken in as orphans by their mother's family—can't yet know how the bonds of their makeshift household will be tested and frayed. As their aunt searches for signs from God and their uncle begins an offbeat courtship, everyone in the house on Salt Hay Road is pulled toward two greater cataclysms: the legendary hurricane of 1938 and the encroaching war. Carin Clevidence's debut novel is suffused with a haunting sense of place: salt marshes in the summer, ice boats on the frozen Great South Bay, Fire Island at the height of a storm. The House on Salt Hay Road captures the golden light of a vanished time.