The House on Salt Hay Road »

Carin Clevidence has won a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and received a fellowship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Her stories have been published in a number of journals. The House on Salt Hay Road is her first novel.

A fireworks factory explodes in a quiet seaside town. In the house on Salt Hay Road, Clay Poole is thrilled by the hole it’s blown in everyday life. His older sister, Nancy, is more interested in the striking stranger who appears, dusted with ashes, in the explosion’s aftermath. The Pooles—taken in as orphans by their mother’s family—can’t yet know how the bonds of their makeshift household will be tested and frayed. As their aunt searches for signs from God and their uncle begins an offbeat courtship, they are pulled toward two greater cataclysms: the legendary hurricane of 1938 and the encroaching war.

The House on Salt Hay Road is suffused with a haunting sense of place: salt marshes in the summer, ice boats on the frozen Great South Bay, Fire Island at the height of a storm. A vivid and emotionally resonant debut, it captures the golden light of a vanished time, and the hold that home has on us long after we leave it.

The New York Times - Susann Cokal

Clevidence's Long Island is a lushly described place of wild marshes, shallow bays and beckoning beaches…There may be a bit too much local color for some readers' tastes, but the eccentric characters we expect of a small town are evoked with a reverence that lifts them from the precious to the pageworthy…Clevidence has a gift for creating images that express the unspeakable.

Part One A Floating House

Spring 1937 3

Summer 1937 49

Part Two Honey in the Walls

Late Summer and Fall 1937 97

Winter 1937-1938 146

Spring and Summer 1938 174

Part Three Falling Houses

Fall 1938 219

Later 265

Fall 1945 281

Acknowledgments 287