The Oyster Singer

The Oyster SingerON THE ISLAND SIDE OF THE BAY, tourists flock to the beaches and every season summer residents return to their expensive beach homes. On their way they pass a community of low, ticky tacky houses and accidental bungalows known as Mud City. They barely notice it. But it is here, on this abandoned stretch of marshland, that lost lives wash up like driftwood. They float and intersect like debris in tidal currents and sometimes, when conditions are just

ON THE ISLAND SIDE OF THE BAY, tourists flock to the beaches and every season summer residents return to their expensive beach homes. On their way they pass a community of low, ticky-tacky houses and accidental bungalows known as Mud City. They barely notice it. But it is here, on this abandoned stretch of marshland, that lost lives wash up like driftwood. They float and intersect like debris in tidal currents and sometimes, when conditions are just right, they connect.



In this episodic novel, cats are trained to dive for fish; a boat-builder is holed up in an abandoned fish factory making sailing sneakboxes by hand (although no one wants his craftsmanship anymore); a huge jetty boulder is stolen; and a party is held on an island that vanishes at high tide.


The protagonist, Lum (not quite a hero) quotes Lincoln a lot, tells stories, and can perform a kind of yodeling-bagpipe call that brings oysters up out of the bay. He thinks he's found his place in the world. People respond to Lum with their own stories and as they are shared a community of no-longer-lost souls forms. But there are those who want to take this place away, and when a body is found floating in Mud City, a search for the perpetrators is launched in the mysterious Pinelands, and the tone is set for changes to come. Ultimately, as with all coastal property, a developer discovers Mud City and the squatters must chose to leave or fight.

Evocative, poetic and funny descriptions of the place and its seasons (including an almost mystical description of being lost in a sudden storm on the bay) slip between the stories as the two main characters — a man and a woman as nature would have it — drift around one another, pulled together, pushed apart.

The Oyster Singer is a novel about second chances and soulmates, love lost and found, adventurers, drifters, developers and dreamers, in a place called Mud City on a shore bound for change.