Sea Glass was published by Little, Brown in 2002, the second novel in Shreve’s loosely connected series set in fictional Fortune’s Rocks, New Hampshire. The time has shifted to 1929, and the seaside cottage from the earlier novel is now a modest home occupied by Honora and Sexton Beecher, newlyweds who have purchased it with money they do not have. Sexton is a typewriter salesman; the stock market crash and the Depression are about to make his profession obsolete.
The narrative expands outward from the couple to encompass the life of the mill town: McDermott, an Irish-American loom fixer who becomes involved in labor organizing; Alphonse, a ten-year-old French-Canadian boy who works in the mill; Vivian, a socialite whose fortune has evaporated. Their stories converge around the 1934 textile strike — a real event in New England labor history — that transforms the town.
Shreve’s characteristic technique is to use the domestic as a lens for the political. The marriage between Honora and Sexton — initially romantic, then strained by economic pressure, then shattered by betrayal — mirrors the larger social contract between workers and owners that is breaking down across Depression-era America. The sea glass of the title, which Honora collects on the beach, provides the novel’s governing metaphor: broken things, smoothed by time and water into something beautiful but still, fundamentally, fragments.
Collecting Sea Glass
First edition (Little, Brown, Boston, 2002): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $10–$30
- Very good/very good: $5–$15