The new novel from Anita Diamant, author of the phenomenal bestseller, 'The Red Tent', follows the lives and loves of an eccentric 19th century farming community in Massachusetts, and demonstrates both her amazing range as a novelist and her capacity to understand and honour people's lives.
In the first decades of the nineteenth century there was once a place called Dogtown. Located on a rocky outcrop on Cape Ann, the northernmost boundary of Massachusetts Bay, it was a miserable place really, less a village than a motley collection of people scraping out a meagre existence who had nowhere else to go. Yet the death of a village, even one as poor and small as Dogtown, is not an altogether trivial thing.
With a sure and delicate touch, Anita Diamant introduces us to the Dogtown community, each of whom has their own quietly compelling story, secrets and sadness, interweaving the stories of the mysterious black African woman Ruth, who dresses as a man, the carpenter who doubles as an amateur dentist, the child Sammy, who arrived in Dogtown with a note attached to his coat, the touching and tender love story of Judy Rhines and Cornelius and presiding over all, the benign and diminutive Easter Carter, host of what passes as the local tavern.
Reminiscent of Annie Proulx's 'The Shipping News', 'The Last Days Of Dogtown' vividly brings to life an unforgettable community of eccentrics and misfits, the sad, the lonely and the bad, the forgotten people of the New World who live on the fringes of polite society, foraging for their scraps. With great depth of feeling, Diamant shows us the value and sorrow of these quiet, small lives, lived in that harsh, windswept landscape and under that bright sky.
