Caitlin Shetterly at Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store welcomes CAITLIN SHETTERLY—author of Modified and Made for You and Me—for a discussion of her debut novel Pete and Alice in Maine. She will be joined in conversation by author of the international bestselling memoir My Salinger Year, JOANNA RAKOFF.

About Pete and Alice in Maine

Reeling from a painful betrayal in her marriage as the Covid pandemic takes hold in New York City, Alice packs up her family and flees to their vacation home in Maine. She hopes to find sanctuary—from the uncertainties of the exploding pandemic and her faltering marriage.

Putting distance between herself and the stresses and troubles of the city, Alice begins to feel safe and relieved. But the locals are far from friendly. Trapped and forced into quarantine by hostile neighbors, Alice sees the imprisoning structure of her life in this new predicament. Stripped down to the bare essentials of survival and tending to the needs of her two children, she can no longer ignore all the ways in which she feels limited and lost—lost in the big city, lost as a wife, lost as a mother, lost as a daughter and lost as a person.

As the world shifts around her and the balance in her marriage tilts, Alice and her husband, Pete, are left to consider if what keeps their family safe is the same thing as what keeps their family together.

Praise for Pete and Alice in Maine

“A vividly realistic portrait of day-to-day life during lockdown, of the ways the pandemic both cleaved families together and wrenched them apart. Laced with wry humor, Pete and Alice in Maine is that rare thing: a deeply intelligent page-turner.” —Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year

"When we first meet the title characters of Caitlin Shetterly’s gripping novel Pete and Alice in Maine, they’re fleeing pandemic ravaged New York with their children for the relative safety of their second home. How satisfying it would be in this age of easy social media judgment to despise them for their privilege. The only thing preventing it, really, is that this very fine novel—like all good novels—insists upon getting to know them. I loved it." —Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls

"Rarely is a fictional voice so intimate, honest, and revealing. Alice's carefully created family life is interrupted and her consequent fears are described with deep intelligence in exquisite sentences. I loved this book!" — Alice Elliott Dark, author of Fellowship Point

Mask Policy

Masks are encouraged but not required for this event.