My Kind of People

by Lisa Duffy

Genres: Family Life; Friendship; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

From the author of The Salt House and This Is Home comes a profound novel about the power of community and a small town's long-buried secrets as a group of New England islanders come together for a recently orphaned girl.

On Ichabod Island, a jagged strip of land thirteen miles off the coast of Massachusetts, ten-year-old Sky becomes an orphan for the second time after a tragic accident claims the lives of her adoptive parents.

Grieving the death of his best friends, Leo's life is turned upside down when he finds himself the guardian of young Sky. Back on the island and struggling to balance his new responsibilities and his marriage to his husband, Leo is supported by a powerful community of neighbors, many of them harboring secrets of their own.

Maggie, who helps with Sky's childcare, has hit a breaking point with her police chief husband, who becomes embroiled in a local scandal. Her best friend Agnes, the island busybody, invites Sky's estranged grandmother to stay for the summer, straining already precarious relationships. Their neighbor Joe struggles with whether to tell all was not well in Sky's house in the months leading up to the accident. And among them all is a mysterious woman, drawn to Ichabod to fulfill a dying wish.

Perfect for fans of Celeste Ng and Ann Leary, My Kind of People is a riveting, impassioned novel about the resilience of community and what connects us all in the face of tragedy.

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

Chapter 1

1
In the hours before dawn, she slips out of the house and runs. She knows the way by heart, even though she’s only ten, and the land swells around her like the mother’s bosom she never knew.

She follows the path that winds near the cliff, the edge nipping at her feet, threatening to swallow her whole. Spit her out on the rocky shore below.

She left the men sleeping.

Xavier passed out on the couch, but Leo roamed the house all night, as though he knew she might leave. Even stood over her bed once while she pretended to sleep, her back to him, his shadow on the wall looming through her half-lidded eyes.

When she finally heard his breathing, slow and deep from the other room, she left. Silently and swiftly, even though the night was soundless and black. She was good at that. Disappearing in the cracks between light and sound.

The wind licks her ankles. Spray from the water below clings to her hair, coats her legs and arms in the icy Atlantic.

She pauses on the cliff above the ocean. Her foot tingles, ready to step. But the night grips her body, presses against her until she’s flattened, as though she’s a leaf pressed between pages, the darkness sandwiching her in place.

She thought it would be easy.

Simple even. To step into nothing. To sail off the earth just like her parents had done, the wind taking her breath, filling the emptiness inside her body.

But Ichabod Island won’t let her.

When her toes touch the edge of the granite rock, the island stirs. The trees bend. The wind howls and the ocean roars and the lighthouse glares until she turns and runs, her feet pounding the dirt path through the woods.

When the sun finds her later in a wooden house high in the trees, safely away from the cliff, sound asleep on a bed of feathers, she doesn’t stir. She doesn’t feel the day rise above her. The cloudless sky peering down with its bright yellow eye.

She sleeps soundly. On her own. Just like she should be. Just like she came into the world.

Nobody knows she’s gone. The men don’t know she ran away. When they find out, they’ll ask why. Over and over, they’ll ask why.

She won’t have an answer. She never does.

She’s not even sure there is one.