It is a house on the beach. Honora doesn't mind renting — despite its age and all its flaws, the old house is the perfect place for a new marriage. She and Sexton throw themselves into fixing it up, just as they throw themselves into their new life together. Each morning, Honora collects sea glass washed up on the shore, each piece carrying a different story in its muted hues.

Sexton finds a way to buy the house, but his timing is perfectly wrong. The economy takes a sickening crash, and as financial pressures mount, Honora begins to see how little she knows this man she has married — and to realize just how threatening the world outside her front door can be.

Like those translucent shards that Honora finds on the beach, Sea Glass is layered with the textures, colors, and voices of another time. There is Vivian, an irreverent Boston socialite who becomes Honora's closest friend even as she rejects every form of convention. McDermott, a man who works in a nearby mill, presses Honora's deepest notions of trust — even as he embroils her in a dangerous dispute. And there's Francis, a boy whose openness becomes the bond that holds these people together as their world is flying apart.

Reviewers and readers everywhere have admired Anita Shreve's ability to create a "literary novel of the caliber and craft of Edith Wharton or Henry James" (Baltimore Sun). Sea Glass is an unforgettable story of trust and betrayal, marriage and attraction, from one of the most persuasive, farseeing, and deeply engaging writers of our time.

"In addition to spinning one of her most absorbing narratives, Shreve here rewards readers with the third volume in a trilogy set in the large house on the New Hampshire coast that figured in The Pilot's Wife and Fortune's Rocks....This is one of Shreve's best, likely to win her a wider audience." Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Shreve once again scores big with a wonderful new novel about marriage and love....Vibrant characters, coupled with a graceful writing style, make Shreve's novel perfect for readers who appreciate multilayered stories with a social conscience." Library Journal

"The mood here is dark, but Shreve's fans will take some comfort in her typically elegant, lucid prose, evocative of the natural world and subtly probing of character....A sterling effort from an intelligent and entertaining popular novelist." Kirkus Reviews

Now in paperback comes the bestselling novel by the author of "The Pilot's Wife" and "The Last Time They Met." Set in 1929 at a decaying beach house on the Atlantic Coast, "Sea Glass" unfolds a richly engaging tale of marriage, money, and troubled times.

With all the narrative power and emotional immediacy that have made her novels acclaimed international bestsellers, Anita Shreve unfolds a richly engaging tale of marriage, money, and troubled times-the story of a pair of young newlyweds who, setting out to build a life together in a derelict beach house on the Atlantic coast, soon discover how threatening the world outside their front door can be.

Set in 1929 at a decaying beach house on the Atlantic Coast, "Sea Glass" unfolds a richly engaging tale of marriage, money, and troubled times.

Anita Shreve is the author of the novels The Pilot's Wife, The Weight of Water, Eden Close, Strange Fits of Passion, Where or When, and Resistance. She divides her time between Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Anita Shreve began writing fiction while working as a high school teacher. Although one of her first published stories, "Past the Island, Drifting," was awarded an O. Henry Prize in 1975, Shreve felt she couldn't make a living as a fiction writer so she became a journalist. She traveled to Africa, and spent three years in Kenya, writing articles that appeared in magazines such as Quest, US, and Newsweek. Back in the United States, she turned to raising her children and writing freelance articles for magazines. Shreve later expanded two of these articles — both published in the New York Times Magazine — into the nonfiction books Remaking Motherhood and Women Together, Women Alone. At the same time Shreve also began working on her first novel, Eden Close. With its publication in 1989, she gave up journalism for writing fiction full time, thrilled, as she says, with "the rush of freedom that I could make it up."