In crystal clear prose evocative of the sea and weather by which he is surrounded, Harbor Lights follows the last weeks of lobster fisherman Warren Hudon’s life. His character and passions shaped by the rough waters of southern Maine on which he spends his days, Warren has created a life of almost absolute isolation. But when he is diagnosed with rapidly developing cancer, he finds himself driven to make peace with his long-estranged wife, Beatrice, and their adult daughter, Marian.

Warren’s search for reconciliation quickly forces him to confront the compromises of his past”Beatrice’s long-standing affair with married senator Virgil Pound; Marian’s alliance with her mother against her father; and the injustices wreaked daily against the lobstermen of Maine. Told in restrained, evocative prose, Harbor Lights mesmerizes its readers with a tale of a marriage gone seriously awry and with Warren’s growing rage, which reels out of control, culminating in an act of passionate violence.

Praise

“Ted Weesner, over the years since his powerful first novel, The Car Thief, has come numerous times to the rescue of American realism in fiction, and he’s done it again with Harbor Lights, a tough-minded and compassionate portrait of a good man struggling against terrible odds not to hurt the people he loves.” –Russell Banks

“The triumph of Weesner’s rigorously realistic story is that we come to know his characters as fully as we know ourselves, yet are as startled by the directions in which their emotions lead them as we are by the unpredictability of our own lives. An unforgettable novel, unquestionably Weesner’s best to date.” –Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Harbor Lights is strong, comprehensible modern literature–powerful, sad, shocking, and all too real.” –Flint Journal

“From the opening pages of Harbor Lights, I was absorbed in Ted Weesner’s vivid characters and their passionate dilemmas. This is a wonderfully engrossing and suspenseful novel.” –Margot Livesey

“Theodore Weesner’s new novel is a beautiful piece of work, as handsomely crafted as it is deeply felt.” –William H. Pritchard

“Sensitively and intelligently composed . . . [Harbor Lights] sings with a poetic simplicity that recalls Russell Banks or Carolyn Chute.” –Publishers Weekly