Little Great Island

On Little Great Island, climate change is disrupting both life and love

After offending the powerful pastor of a cult, Mari McGavin has to flee with her six-year-old son. With no money and no place else to go, she returns to the tiny Maine island where she grew up-a place she swore she'd never see again. There Mari runs into her lifelong friend Harry Richardson, one of the island's summer residents, now back himself to sell his family's summer home. Mari and Harry's lives intertwine once again, setting off a chain of events as unexpected and life altering as the shifts in climate affecting the whole ecosystem of the island...from generations of fishing families to the lobsters and the butterflies.

Little Great Island Illustrates in microcosm the greatest changes of our time and the unyielding power of love.

“This tale of a small Maine island trying to reinvent itself in the face of irreversible climate change combines the uncanny understanding of the rural character of Richard Russo or Colm Toibin with the fluid prose and glorious imagination of Anthony Doerr—writers to whom Woodworth is being compared.” —Betsy Burton, The King’s English Bookshop, Salt Lake City, Utah

“I adored this new Novel set on an island in rural Maine. Woodworth writes like an angel.” —Gayle Shanks, Changing Hands Bookstores

“What do we care about and why? Told in a fugue of brilliantly unique voices, Little Great Island centers on a runaway mother and her young son, a grieving man who’s come to sell the family vacation home, and the plight of the locals, decimated by how climate change is ruining the lobster fishing and way of life that they depend on. About good people and bad decisions, small towns and big corporations, this is also a novel about how deep love - for others and for our planet - can evolve. And, if we are lucky, heal.” —Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Days of Wonder

“...an extraordinary achievement and a pure pleasure to read.” —Ha Jin, National Book Award and PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of Waiting and Pulitzer-prize nominated author of War Trash

“Put Anthony Doerr’s The Shell Collector, John Banville’s The Sea, and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge into a mixer and out comes Kate Woodworth’s deeply beautiful Little Great Island. With stunning prose and heart-achingly empathetic characters, Woodworth’s story of perseverance amidst change and loss is perfect for our turbulent, changing times.” —Sophie Powell, author of The Mushroom Man

“If you love the novels of Elizabeth Strout and Anne Rivers Siddons...you will love Little Great Island. This is one of those novels you will carry inside you forever.” —Jenna Blum, New York Times and internationally bestselling author of Those Who Save Us and The Lost Family

“Little Great Island is a book about place, and overcoming grief, and how place can heal. A book where people owe something to the land, because the land gives freely of itself to help people, and only asks that we don’t destroy it in the process. The island itself - beautiful, struggling, enduring Little Great Island - is a character in and of itself, the central fulcrum around which this story hums with life and purpose.” —Whitney Scharer, author  of the internationally best-selling and award-winning novel, The Age of Light

“Kate Woodworth is a beautiful writer, and Little Great Island is a beautiful book about loss and forgiveness and second chances. About going home again and confronting the ghosts that haunt us.” —Shari Goldhagen, author of Family Life and Other Accidents; In Some Other World, Maybe; and 100 Days of Cake

“A powerful and satisfying examination of one woman’s fight to save herself, her son, and the community she calls home.” —Mira T. Lee, author of Everything Here is Beautiful, one of Oprah O Magazine’s 15 Favorite Books of 2018  and an Amazon Top 20 Best Literature/Fiction books of 2018

“A meditation on loss and a vibrant call to action, Little Great Island is, like the waters around Maine’s coast, both beautiful and nourishing.” —Julie Gerstenblatt, author of Daughters of Nantucket

Kate Woodworth is the author of the novel Racing Into the Dark (EP Dutton, 1989), hailed as “A compelling exploration of mental illness” by Booklist and as an “auspicious debut” by Publishers Weekly. Her short stories have appeared in Cimarron Review, Western Humanities Review, Shenandoah and other literary journals. A retired medical writer in addition to fiction writer, she has received numerous awards and recognition for her writing, including a Pushcart Prize nomination, multiple Utah Arts Council and Dalton Pen Communication Awards, and an International Association of Business Communicators finalist recognition. She received her MFA from Boston University.

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