Ocean State Libraries

What comes after the moment that forever changes your life? This question haunts Julia Bechtel, Noah Prine, and Kim Collela, the only survivors of a terrible boating accident that claims the lives of nine other people off the coast of Maine. Julia, a 40-year-old wife and mother, has always taken the path of least resistance. Feeling strangely connected to Noah, the divorced, brooding lobsterman who helped save her life, Julia begins to explore the...

Ruth Thomas returns from boarding school to join her family in their Maine island lobster fishing business which is in a age-old fishing feud with other local lobstermen.

Paul Watkins spent six years as a crewman on a deep-sea fishing boat. This novel tells his story. The coast of New England: beautiful but savage, where storms can whip up out of nowhere, and the wrecks wash up on the beach. James Pfeiffer, a young college dropout, is initiated into the gruelling world of the trawler boats, where he discovers the thrill and terror of life at sea. Paul Watkins's gripping novel tells the brutal story of life on...

"A fishing guide and part-time investigator, Hannah Smith is a tall, strong Florida woman descended from many generations of the same. But the problem before her now is much older even than that. Five hundred years ago, Spanish conquistadors planted the first orange seeds in Florida, but now the whole industry is in trouble. The trees are dying at the root, weakened by infestation and genetic manipulation, and the only solution might be somehow, somewhere,...

One legendary insect-enormous, white, and exceedingly rare-attracts trout of such size that they couldn't possibly exist in the world as we know it. But in Heywood's classic novel, such things can and do exist. Protagonist Bowie Rhodes, UPI reporter and expert fly fisherman, had learned of the snowfly early in his childhood. It hatches every seven to ten years, never on the same river twice, bringing to rise trout so huge they would have to have...

"A sweeping Elizabethan historical fantasy from an internationally renowned author that evokes the seafaring adventures of Robert Louis Stevenson with the magic of The Bear and the Nightingale"-- 1588. Reynard Shotwood survived the destruction of the Spanish Armada's failed invasion, but floated into the water off Suffolk, the sole survivor of an enlisted English fishing boat. Rescued by a crippled Spanish galleon, he is tasked by the captain to...

Every fall, the men of Loyalty Island sail from the Olympic Peninsula up to the Bering Sea to spend the winter catching king crab. To Cal, Alaska remains as mythical and mysterious as Treasure Island. But while Cal is too young to accompany his father, he is old enough to know that everything depends on the fate of those boats thousands of miles north. He is also old enough to wonder about his mother's relationship with John Gaunt, owner of the fleet....

"An Iceland Fisherman" by Pierre Loti is an immersive voyage into the heart of the 19th century seafaring life. In this elegantly crafted novel, you'll embark on an epic journey with the rugged and hardy Breton fishermen as they traverse the tumultuous Icelandic waters in pursuit of the elusive cod. Vividly portrayed through Loti's lyrical prose, the unyielding ocean transforms into a canvas of human resilience, trials, and tribulations, reflecting...