Inspired by the life of Rachel Carson, this sweeping historical novel follows a young Maine islander whose dreams of becoming a scientist are upended by love, sacrifice, and a secret that resurfaces decades later.

Seventeen-year-old Galene Macgregor dreams of becoming a marine scientist, though life on a small Maine island offers little room for ambition. In the summer of 1963, she divides her days between caring for her father, who is losing his sight, and helping her struggling lobsterman brother, Sam. Her future feels distant-until she is hired as a maid for renowned author and conservationist Rachel Carson, a seasonal resident.

Galene has long admired Carson's writing about the sea, and the job quickly becomes something more. As she assists Carson during the tense months leading up to the publication of Silent Spring, Galene is drawn into a world of intellectual rigor, public scrutiny, and quiet courage. In Carson's presence, she begins to imagine a life beyond the limits of her island.

But that awakening is disrupted by a summer romance with James, the son of a wealthy family with its own hidden fractures. When Galene becomes pregnant and James disappears under the weight of his family's unraveling secrets, her carefully forming future collapses.

Told in dual timelines, Shorelines asks what it means to return home and face a past that has never stopped haunting you. Walking the tide line between ambition and obligation, this gripping novel explores the cost of the roads not taken, the choices women make in the shadow of their own dreams, and the enduring pull of place.

A richly atmospheric story of ambition, motherhood, and the sea, Shorelines will resonate with readers who were moved by the feminine resilience of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge and the historical depth of Amanda Peters' The Berry Pickers,  and who find the epic in the intimate, the universal in the deeply local.