Return to the Outer Banks House

by Diann Ducharme

Overview

She was the spirited daughter of a North Carolina plantation owner, and he was a poor fisherman who she tutored on the porch of her family's Nags Head cottage. When we last saw Abigail Sinclair and Ben Whimble at the close of The Outer Banks House, they'd overcome their differences in life stations and defied convention to begin their new life together.

But now it's seven years later, and Return to the Outer Banks House finds the couple married and in hard times-riddled by poverty, miscarriages, and weakened family ties. The strong bonds that once held them together have eroded over time, and their marriage threatens to unravel, particularly when relationships from the past and ambitions for the future find their way into the mismatched couple's present predicament.

Can their love survive? Or are the challenges they face insurmountable? Return to the Outer Banks House carries readers back to 1875 to answer these questions and explore the ebb and flow of a rocky marriage set against the enchanting North Carolina shoreline. Replete with history, intrigue, and plenty of maritime drama, it's an evocative tale of struggle in the Reconstruction-era South.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780692312926
Publisher:	Diann Ducharme
Publication date:	12/10/2014
Series:	Outer Banks House , #2
Pages:	418
Sales rank:	238,546
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Diann Ducharme holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Virginia and a master's degree in teaching from Virginia Commonwealth University. A native of Newport News, Virginia, she has vacationed on the Outer Banks of North Carolina all of her life and has used this familiar setting as a backdrop for her writing.

Ducharme's literary debut, The Outer Banks House, was published in 2010, her second novel Chasing Eternity in 2012, and the highly anticipated Return to the Outer Banks House in 2014.

Ducharme currently resides in Manakin-Sabot, Virginia, with her husband, Sean, their three beach-loving children, and their energetic border collie, Toby.

Editorial Reviews

2014-12-20
A heartbreaking yet uplifting novel that explores the destruction and beauty of love. Set between 1875 and '76, Ducharme's story—this being the sequel to The Outer Banks House (2010)—is about love and its many faces, from young and reckless to unrequited. Specifically, she explores the unlikely passion that forms between smart, affluent Abigail Sinclair and uneducated, penniless Benjamin Whimble. The people of this tightknit island community on the Outer Banks, off the coast of North Carolina, are connected by their collective poverty and abiding love for the sea. Outsiders are generally unwelcome. When Abigail's family visits for a summer, she starts teaching Ben, her father's fishing guide, how to read. His love for literature and for his teacher grows, and slowly he drifts away from longtime girlfriend, Eliza Dickens, eventually leaving her to marry Abigail. Although this new love is strong, tragedy tests it. Seven years later, the worst behind them, the couple picks through their past separately, putting together the pieces of themselves they lost along the way. Meanwhile, all these years later, plucky and independent Eliza has never fully recovered from losing Ben. She fights for his return and learns much more about herself in the process. Supporting characters, many with equally interesting lives, float in and out of the story as well. Ducharme beautifully shifts among love stories, weaving lives together. She also daftly expresses the tensions between economic classes. In her fog of love, Abigail joyfully leaves behind the security of her life at home so she can be with a man who could never financially provide for her in the ways she's accustomed; only after the wedding does it hit her. "Words had failed us that night, and I'd welcomed the silence," she thinks. "Words had escaped me the next morning as well but in a different way, when I came to realize that I was married to a fisherman for the rest of my days." A study in love, class, and the profound ways people grow and adapt to life's challenges.

Kirkus Reviews