June 28, 2021
Khoury debuts with a mesmerizing account of a restless man from Cape Cod who starts a new life on the Outer Banks at Cape Hatteras with a new family. In 1890s Chatham, Mass., Gilead Lodge opens a seaside hotel and abruptly leaves his first wife, Blythe, to strike out for Cape Hatteras. His story is delivered mainly via Blythe in 1942, when Gil’s daughter Gillian, from his second marriage, mysteriously turns up on her porch, eager to hear tales of her late father. Blythe regales Gillian with stories of Gil’s adventures, such as a failed attempt to save a capsized ship (he was also keeper of Chatham’s Life-Saving Station) just before he left for North Carolina, and the origins of Gil’s relationship to Gillian’s mother, who was 12 when they met. While Blythe’s limited perspective on Gil makes the plot feel a bit too simplistic, Khoury describes Gil’s relationship to the Outer Banks with lyrical precision: “For Gil was wed not to us, but to a place, and to that place he was the most faithful of men.” This should do the trick as elevated beach reading. Agent: Madison Smartt Bell, Ayesha Pande Literary.
August 1, 2021
DEBUT In this mournful historical novel, Blythe Lodge is forced to confront her late husband's second family when his daughter Gillian shows up on her Cape Cod doorstep to learn more about her father's life. Gillian, who's on her way to serve in the Red Cross during World War II, is shocked to learn that Gil had been married before meeting her mother (and had never divorced Blythe). Blythe and Gillian, between them, tease out the mystery of a private man's life. Gil had floated between two capes--Cape Cod in Massachusetts and Cape Hatteras in North Carolina--throughout his life. Cape Cod is where Gil was born and married Blythe. Cape Hatteras is where his brother died in the Civil War Battle of Chicamacomico Races. It's also where he bigamously married a much younger woman and started a family with her. But why? VERDICT Khoury based her debut novel on a true story recorded in historical newspaper accounts. Readers will enjoy her slow-paced emotional historical fiction about the pain inflicted by the Civil War on soldiers and their families.--Jennifer Mills, Shorewood-Troy Lib., IL
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July 1, 2021
Spanning the interval between the Civil War and WWII, this debut novel centers on an improbable friendship that evolves between two women, strangers at first, who are bound by life, death, and the decisions of one man. Narrator Blythe Lodge is living her final years in small-town Chatham, near Cape Cod, when young nurse Gillian (Gilly) intrudes on her solitude to demand answers from her father's first wife before shipping out to Europe in 1942. Blythe's husband and Gilly's father, Gilead, the "man with two families," left Blythe years earlier, yet her memories of their life together keep him ever present. She never recovered from the loss of their infant sons, while Gil never recovered from the Civil War loss of his older brother Ben, in faraway Chicamacomico, near Cape Hatteras, a place he is drawn to visit recurrently. Gil is a man of the sea, serving with the U.S. Life-Saving Service, where shipwreck rescues are the frenetic disturbances in a languorous existence. Khoury's atmospheric depiction of her characters' interwoven lives is beautifully rendered.
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