Monterey Bay

A beautiful debut set around the creation of the world-famous Monterey Bay Aquarium–and the last days of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row

In 1940, fifteen year-old Margot Fiske arrives on the shores of Monterey Bay with her eccentric entrepreneur father. Margot has been her father’s apprentice all over the world, until an accident in Monterey’s tide pools drives them apart and plunges her head-first into the mayhem of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.

Steinbeck is hiding out from his burgeoning fame at the raucous lab of Ed Ricketts, the biologist known as Doc in Cannery Row. Ricketts, a charismatic bohemian, quickly becomes the object of Margot’s fascination. Despite Steinbeck’s protests and her father’s misgivings, she wrangles a job as Ricketts’s sketch artist and begins drawing the strange and wonderful sea creatures he pulls from the waters of the bay.

Unbeknownst to Margot, her father is also working with Ricketts. He is soliciting the biologist’s advice on his most ambitious and controversial project to date: the transformation of the Row’s largest cannery into an aquarium. When Margot begins an affair with Ricketts, she sets in motion a chain of events that will affect not just the two of them, but the future of Monterey as well.

Alternating between past and present, Monterey Bay explores histories both imagined and actual to create an unforgettable portrait of an exceptional woman, a world-famous aquarium, and the beloved town they both call home.

"Like Euphoria and The Signature of All Things, Monterey Bay is about passion–for ideas as well as lovers–that soaks in so deeply you can’t ever wash it away. By the novel’s end, I was in love with Ed Ricketts and feisty Margot Fiske myself–and with Monterey Bay too, which Lindsay Hatton brings to life with phenomenal skill." Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You

"The descriptions of marine life are sensuously precise…Hatton shapes a jagged coming-of-age and growing-old story with fine vignettes held together by Margot’s pluck and her commitment to feelings and memories that matter deeply. Along with creating a fully realized, realistic heroine seen across decades, Hatton is a writer of often exceptional prose." Kirkus (Starred Review)

"Plunge right into 1940s Monterey, and the Cannery Row made famous by John Steinbeck, in this historical novel about famously charming biologist Ed Ricketts. In limpid prose and acutely captured sensual detail, Hatton tells the story of 15-year-old Margot Fiske, who arrives at Cannery Row with her entrepreneurial father, but snarls up his plans by getting mixed up with Ricketts — first as his sketch artist, then as his lover." Huffington Post’s Summer 2016 Books You Won’t Want to Miss

"Fans of John Steinbeck and his Cannery Row stories will delight in this novel. She does an excellent job of recreating the Cannery Row that no longer exists, honoring the memory of Steinbeck and Ricketts (the real-life inspiration for Cannery Row’s Doc) and all the workers who once toiled there, as seen through the eyes of a precocious teenage heroine." Publishers Weekly

"Hatton’s authoritative writing elicits strong emotions, and in this biographically shaped historical novel she brings to life the realm of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, including Steinbeck himself, Ricketts’ brooding patron." Booklist

Lindsay Hatton is a graduate of Williams College. She holds an MFA from the Creative Writing Program at New York University. She currently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but was born and raised in Monterey, California, where she spent many fascinating and formative summers working behind the scenes at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Whenever I thought of the aquarium and how it came to be, I could see an imagined tale of heartbreak and ambition just below the factual surface: an alternate founding legend that captured how it really felt to stand knee-deep in a tank full of hungry bat rays, to watch the morning fog roll in, to be alone on Cannery Row at midnight and hear the whispers of ghosts...

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