On This Day

When their parents die within a year of each other, eighteen-year-old Warren and twenty-year-old Joan are left in their small coastal town in Maine, no longer as a son and daughter but only as a brother and sister. As they attempt to both grieve and grow up, their lives become even more complicated-their father's business partner strips them of their rightful financial interest in the family plant nursery, and a suspicious aunt and uncle suddenly reappear in their lives. As Joan turns to her unreliable ex-boyfriend for comfort, Warren finds himself transfixed with a beautiful single mother in town. A moving, hopeful story of two young people's struggle to make a place and a home for themselves, On This Day is debut novelist Nathaniel Bellows's lyrical, layered consideration of memory-the necessity of facing a family's dark history in order to begin a new life.