The Midcoast: A Novel

by Adam White Narrated by George Newbern

Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER ¿ “Propulsive . . . An absorbing look at small-town Maine and the thwarted dreams of a family trying to transcend it.”-Lee Cole, The New York Times (Editors' Choice)

“I tore through the saga of the Thatch family in two nights. The Midcoast is a reader's dream-tense, ominous, and deeply wise.”-David Benioff, co-creator of Game of Thrones

Finalist for the New England Society Book Award ¿ A CrimeReads Best Book of the Year

It's spring in the tiny town of Damariscotta, a tourist haven on the coast of Maine known for its oysters and antiques. Andrew, a high school English teacher recently returned to the area, has brought his family to Ed and Steph Thatch's sprawling riverside estate to attend a reception for the Amherst women's lacrosse team. Back when they were all teenagers, Andrew never could have predicted that Ed, descended from a long line of lobstermen, or Steph, a decent student until she dropped out to start a family, would ever send a daughter to a place like Amherst. But so the tides have turned, and Andrew's trying hard to admire, more than envy, the view from Ed's rolling backyard meadow. 
 
As Andrew wanders through the Thatches' house, he stumbles upon a file he's not supposed to see: photos of a torched body in a burned-out sedan. And when a line of state police cruisers crashes the Thatches' reception an hour later, Andrew and his neighbors finally begin to see the truth behind Ed and Steph's remarkable rise. Soon the newspapers are running headlines about the Thatches, and Andrew's poring over his memories, trying to piece together the story of a family he thought he knew. 

A propulsive drama that cares as deeply about its characters as it does about the crimes they commit, The Midcoast explores the machinations of privilege, the dark recesses of the American dream, and the lies we tell as we try, at all costs, to protect the ones we love.

Editorial Reviews

JULY 2022 - AudioFile

George Newbern opens this novel in the matter-of-fact tone of its main character. His voice increases in intensity as the mystery develops: How did lobsterman Ed Thatch—who started from nothing—make so much money? Other than the shop that sells buoys with pictures of politicians painted on them, there’s nothing special about Damariscotta, unless it’s a noticeably low crime rate. Newbern doesn’t sound like a true Mainer, but then the novel’s narrator is first generation, almost an outsider. Almost a tourist. Newbern’s voice is well modulated, giving listeners time to enjoy the skillful writing, the colorful characters. He puts the thrill into this thriller. If there’s a great crime behind every great fortune, then what’s behind the success of this particular lobsterman? B.H.C. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

04/25/2022

A man returns to his small Maine hometown and unravels the dark truth behind its wealthiest family in White’s alluring debut. As a teenager, Andrew worked summers as a dockhand with lobsterman Ed Thatch while dreaming of escaping for school and a new life. But after settling with his wife and two young children in Boston, Andrew decides to move back, thinking it would be cheaper for the family on his teacher and lacrosse coach’s salary. Now, while attending an elaborate reception for the Amherst College lacrosse team at the Thatch home (Ed’s daughter is on the team), he can’t reconcile the new Ed—the town’s wealthy benefactor and owner of several lobster boats—with the humble Ed he knew on the docks. During the party, Andrew finds a folder with photos of a burned-out car and two dead bodies. Stunned, he goes outside, where police cars speed up the driveway. White keeps the nonlinear story on a low boil, gradually hinting at Andrew’s motivation for investigating Ed and the details of his findings, which point to a hidden world of larceny and drug trafficking. An intriguing portrait emerges of the Thatches, as Ed’s wife wishes he would get out of the criminal enterprise, which Ed built to give Steph “the life she deserves,” and their slippery slope ends at a violent conclusion. Readers will be hooked. Agent: Kirby Kim, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (June)

From the Publisher

Looking for an addictive summer read? This crime drama embedded in a moving portrait of two Maine families marks the debut of a genius storyteller.”—People (Book of the Week)

“A propulsive crime saga . . . An absorbing look at small-town Maine and the thwarted dreams of a family trying to transcend it.”—Lee Cole, The New York Times
 
“One of the most anticipated novels of the year.”—Town & Country

“Home is atmosphere, description, trees, and coastline, but it’s also solidity and safety, a sense of knowing and understanding a place. The Midcoast suggests that home is also other people—the ones we love, but also the ones we envy.”—Maine magazine

“In deft, knowing, and crystalline prose, Adam White writes, in essence, the novel about the Maine coast, a winsome, perplexing, and ultimately shadowy place that doesn’t give up its big secrets easily.”—Richard Ford

“The Midcoast is a suspenseful, funny, and chilling uncovering of small-town secrets within a propulsive family drama. . . . A perfect summer read about a perfect vacation haven.”—Angie Kim, author of Miracle Creek

“Vividly drawn and movingly told, The Midcoast is a searching, honest, and evocative portrait of human relationships, hometown secrets, and the hidden machinations of privilege. Adam White’s debut enthralls, a modern classic from a bold and insightful new voice in fiction.”—Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun

“The Midcoast is a brilliant, ferocious debut novel about ambition, class, and crime in coastal Maine, simultaneously propulsive and nuanced. Adam White brings his powerful gifts to bear on a story that speaks directly to our troubled moment with eloquence and heart. After this, Vacationland will never look the same.”—Andrew Martin, author of Early Work

“The Midcoast is an insanely good novel, compulsively readable, with a growing feeling of menace and catastrophe that becomes almost unbearable. Elegantly written, with vivid characters and an intricately realized setting, this is a stunning debut from a writer we will certainly hear from again. I highly recommend this book.”—Douglas Preston, #1 bestselling author of The Lost City of the Monkey God

“The Midcoast expertly weaves sharply realized scenes and a profound sense of empathy into a plotline full of tension, resentments, and dangerous secrets. In [White's] talented hands, we understand how virtues like love and loyalty can still lead us to a sea of vices. . . . A wise and powerful debut!”—Stacey Swann, author of Olympus, Texas

“White’s first novel is a corker, well plotted and paced and with just the right elements of suspense . . . a fine debut.”—Booklist
 
“Don’t rush this one. Savor it.”—Publishers Weekly

“Gripping.”—Down East

Library Journal

07/01/2022

DEBUT In this sometimes-noir tale of small-town social climbing, Andy moves back to his hometown with his family after years away and finds Damariscotta, ME, both unchanged and much changed. Lobsterman Ed Thatch, son of the owner of the town's lobster pound and whom Andy worked with one summer, is now the town's richest man and married to Steph, a non-Mainer, who is now the town manager bent on "improving" the working-class community. Ed has his own civic projects, such as donating the funding for a town athletic field. Though the Thatches sell themselves as an American success story, Ed seems to have resources well beyond those of a lobsterman, and some locals have suspicions. Andy, an English teacher, does his own investigation through writing a book on the Thatches. The suspicions come to a head when two men associated with the drug trade are found dead, and EJ (the Thatches' son, a Damariscotta police officer) vanishes, only to turn up dead in Ohio. VERDICT Worlds collide in this personal tragedy fueled by perceptions of class difference as a man is destroyed by his love for a woman he perceives as "above" him socially and his desire to give her everything in order not to lose her.—Lawrence Rungren

JULY 2022 - AudioFile

George Newbern opens this novel in the matter-of-fact tone of its main character. His voice increases in intensity as the mystery develops: How did lobsterman Ed Thatch—who started from nothing—make so much money? Other than the shop that sells buoys with pictures of politicians painted on them, there’s nothing special about Damariscotta, unless it’s a noticeably low crime rate. Newbern doesn’t sound like a true Mainer, but then the novel’s narrator is first generation, almost an outsider. Almost a tourist. Newbern’s voice is well modulated, giving listeners time to enjoy the skillful writing, the colorful characters. He puts the thrill into this thriller. If there’s a great crime behind every great fortune, then what’s behind the success of this particular lobsterman? B.H.C. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2022-03-30
An ambitious family’s rise and fall plays out in a small town on the Maine coast.

This debut novel opens with what will also be its last scene: a fancy lawn party and lobster bake on the waterfront property of the Thatch family, prominent in the little town of Damariscotta. A celebration of the Amherst College women’s lacrosse team, of which Allie Thatch is a member, it’s a nice party until local English teacher and lacrosse coach Andrew goes poking around in the house and notices some photos of a burned car with two bodies in it—and then the police show up. The book’s narrator, Andrew was raised in Damariscotta, went away for college and jobs, but has moved his young family back. Andrew sometimes narrates in first person, although much of the story is framed as interviews he does after the day of the party for a book he’s writing. He’s known Ed Thatch since they were teenagers, when Andrew worked for the Lobster Pound, owned by Ed’s father, and Ed treated him like a greenhorn. Ed’s life changed when he met Stephanie LeClair. Although, as one character says, “they don’t come from much,” Steph wants nice things and Ed wants her to have them. Circling between past and present, the book recounts how they get them. While he’s fishing for lobsters, Ed starts burglarizing the posh summer homes along the shore during the off season. From there, it’s a quick slide into smuggling drugs from above the Canadian border. Meanwhile, Steph goes to college and becomes the town’s manager and unofficial mayor, ironically dubbing it “Maine’s Safe Haven.” Their son, EJ, becomes a cop, mainly so he can protect his family’s criminal enterprises. It looks like Allie might just make a step up socially and out of Damariscotta altogether after she gets a lacrosse scholarship. But then that party happens. White handles suspense and a complex plot well, but the characters don’t quite come into focus—it’s never clear why Ed and Steph find each other so compelling, and Allie, who serves as a motivation for many of her family’s actions, is a blank herself until very late in the book.

A small-town riff on The Great Gatsby suffers from underdeveloped characters.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176005790
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	06/07/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

PROLOGUE

Back when I lived out of state, people always used to get excited when they found out where I was from. They didn’t meet all that many Mainers—I was like a moose descended from a log cabin, wandering their backyard, eating their shrimp—and wondered if I was from anywhere near the town where they’d gone to summer camp or cruised in their custom sloop. Sometimes I was, sometimes I wasn’t, but Maine is a large state with more coastline than California, I liked to point out, plenty of old gray villages like the one I grew up in, plenty of places to get lost or hide, especially when socked in by a heavy fog. Maybe they’d heard of Damariscotta if they’d ever taken a vacation to the Midcoast, but they tended to pronounce the name wrong and then ask what it meant, and I would say either River of Little Fishes in Abenaki or something Scottish, we weren’t really sure. If they asked what the town was known for, I would have said brick-making, then ice-shipping, then oysters and this one little gallery that sells lobster buoys painted to look like political figures, but this was all before Maeve and I moved back home and bought our coastal charmer with a view!, a listing so pyritic that its author, our realtor, met us at the door mid-apology and with a referral to a rodent removal service.

Before my return I was still telling that old joke, whenever I needed to explain where I was from, about the local who has to give directions to a visiting urbanite. “You can’t get the-yah from he-yah,” says the Mainer, which tells you a little about the roads and highways on the Midcoast, a little more about the shotgun wariness that’ll greet you on so many overgrown front porches, and a lot about the granite breakwalls between those who’ve been here for generations and those who’ve landed more recently, within the past century or two. I am one of these newer arrivals, not a true Mainer—if your parents are from elsewhere, you don’t count, even if you moved to town at age three—but at least I’m not a tourist. We all scowl at the tourists. They ascend as one big traffic jam every summer and presume to know the place just because they’ve rented a cottage with bunk beds and weathered a gentle nor’easter. The other day I saw a couple in matching sunglasses lingering in front of the Sotheby’s, gazing at a flyer full of homes, one of which belonged to the Thatches, our town’s wealthiest family; when I overheard them indulging in the fantasy of moving here year-round, imagining Maine as the way life should be, I found myself wishing I had some other flyer with pictures of the peeling shack Ed Thatch lived in as a child, or the trailer he and his wife Steph moved into when they were only eighteen (or our own drafty ranch, for that matter), just to show these dreamers what they might find if they ever arrived in the off-season and ventured down the wrong dirt road.

To move on from any of these dirt roads was supposed to be impossible, but then the Thatches did just that, moved from there to here—well past here, actually. Steph loved to remind us of their early days, all the hard work and long hours that had put them on this different track, and it’s not that we didn’t believe her, just that we’d heard it all before, heard it plenty. But every small town has its own running dramas, its own local celebrities (there’s a set of twins that’s been calling our high school basketball games since the big playoff run in ’89, and there’s a mussel farmer who wears a bodybuilding getup in every parade—we think because mussel and muscle are homophones—and he’s been doing it since I was in college). So I guess I always assumed I’d return to the Midcoast, if I returned, to find things basically where I’d left them. And most things were. Just not the Thatches. Which was fine. They were off in the distance, nothing to do with us, their rise and fall like a rolling swell tumbling down the coast.

People do move here for the views. Ours is of the salt bay, partially, but also of our neighbor’s three-car garage and a pyramid of algae-covered lobster traps. “The real deal” is how our realtor described the neighborhood, meaning that what we’d see through our windows was mostly the slowly revving engine of Mainers going nowhere. Unless there’s a fog. Then there’s nothing to see, only what everyone else can see, only what’s right in front of us.

But it was a sunny day in May the last time I saw Ed, one year ago now, when I, Maeve, Jack, and Jane went to the Thatches’ house to attend “A Reception in Honor of Amherst Women’s Lacrosse.” That Ed and Steph had somehow given life to and sent into the world a freshman midfielder on the Amherst women’s lacrosse team had never stopped seeming completely implausible, and yet we all knew Allie’s story—this was the daughter—because Ed would give you the lowdown any chance he got. You’d be walking out of the post office or into the natural foods co-op when there’d be a loud honk and you’d look up to see Ed hanging out the driver’s side of his Silverado, banging a flat hand against the door. “Hey, Andy! Two goals against Tufts! She’s on some kinda roll!” And before you even had time to congratulate her, or really him, he’d be thundering down the low brick canyon of Main Street, past the art gallery and the butcher shop, both of which leased from him.

Our family was late getting to the reception so had to park on the shoulder of the gravel driveway, way up by the main road, behind a chartered bus and a steep line of out-of-state SUVs, their rear windows papered in Amherst Lacrosse stickers, Nantucket beach permits, and faux-European circle decals designed to make mv and obx look like legitimate nation-states. Back when Ed and I had worked as teenage dockhands at the Pound, Ed would have called this visiting herd Your kind of people, Andy, but he’s the only one who ever called me Andy, and I always resented the characterization—perhaps because it fit. I had gone away to Exeter, then Dartmouth, played lacrosse at both stops, roomed with Virginia aristocrats who now arrived at reunions with fulltime nannies and made a show of matching any and all donations to the scholarship fund.

I thought I understood, then, what we were getting ourselves into. The women’s lacrosse team would get feted and fed the day before its big game against Bowdoin College. There would be chicken parm and Gatorade. Dads would get sloshed and lean a little too close and deliver pointed musings about the way the team ought to be run, who should be getting more of a burn, who should be riding more pine. They’d be wearing shiny polos with their country clubs’ emblems on the breast, pastel belts embroidered with whales and three-woods. The moms would be overdressed in whatever summer attire had just arrived in the boutiques of Wellesley or Annapolis, and they would ask the players about their girlfriends, or in this case boyfriends, or maybe it didn’t matter anymore.

But as we steered our kids between the Thatches’ garage (formerly a farmhouse) and the house (formerly a barn) and made our way onto the backyard (really a long shimmering meadow that humped down to the river over a series of small hills like an off-season ski slope) it became clear that Ed had taken the concept of “pre-game reception” in a whole new direction. What we were stumbling into was more like a spectacular Midcoastthemed carnival. There was a train of folding tables dressed in purple gingham tablecloths, a trailer-length grill blowing smoke into the sky, and a massive white tent strung with yards and yards of hanging lightbulbs. There was even an inflatable lobster the size of an elephant (where had Ed procured it? I had no idea. I assumed he must have stolen it from some boarded-up state fair). Someone had wedged a lacrosse stick in the lobster’s left claw, and visitors were taking pictures of each other standing next to it as if they had slain the poor thing. The rest of the meadow was overtaken by players, parents, and coaches, all of them wearing purple. 

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