Praise

Description

The new novel from Anita Diamant, author of The Red Tent, follows the lives and loves of an eccentric 19th century farming community in Massachusetts, and demonstrates both her amazing range as a novelist and her capacity to understand and honour people's lives. In the early nineteenth century there was once a place called Dogtown. Located on a rocky outcrop at the northernmost boundary of Massachusetts Bay, it was a miserable place really, less a village than a motley collection of people who had nowhere else to go. Yet the end of a village, even one as poor and small as Dogtown, is not an altogether trivial thing. With a sure and delicate touch, Anita Diamant shares compelling secrets and sadnesses, interweaving the lives of the mysterious black African woman Ruth, who dresses as a man; the child Sammy, who arrived in Dogtown with a note attached to his coat; the touching and tender love story of Judy Rhines and Cornelius; and presiding over all, the benign and diminutive Easter Carter, host of what passes as the local tavern. The Last Days of Dogtown vividly brings to life an unforgettable community of eccentrics and misfits - the forgotten people of the New World who live on the fringes of polite society. With great depth of feeling, Diamant shows us the essential humanity of these quiet, small lives, lived in that harsh, windswept landscape and under that bright sky.