These granite islands

the long version

"These Granite Islands is an arresting first novel about a woman who, on her deathbed, recalls the haunting and fateful summer of 1936, a summer that forever changed her life.". "Isobel has been wife, mother, hatmaker. At the end of her long life she is simply herself, with one last story to tell her only surviving child. She picks up the threads of a mystery that has shadowed her for sixty years and recalls her brief but unforgettable friendship with an extraordinary woman. During one long-ago summer she witnesses a passionate and dangerous love affair that tests her loyalty and challenges her definitions of what is proper. This summer becomes the prism to refract the essence of Isobel's life. When it dissolves in a haunting tragedy, Isobel is left to assess her future and her own marriage and, finally, to ponder the risk of loving someone wholly. An intimate and gripping story of a friendship, a portrait of a marriage, and a meditation on the tragedy of loss."--BOOK JACKET.