A Summer Home in Maine With Centuries-Old Secrets — and a Ghost

THE CLIFFS, by J. Courtney Sullivan

An abandoned house painted purple sits on a promontory overlooking the sea in Awadapquit, Maine. As mysterious houses in fiction often do, it takes on the importance of a central character in J. Courtney Sullivan’s capacious and engaging sixth novel, “The Cliffs.”

Jane Flanagan first spots the house from the water, when she is a teenage tour guide on a lobster boat in the 1990s, earning money during a summer program. Instantly enchanted, Jane cuts her classes in favor of reading the course books under the trees on the property. She explores the house’s nooks and treasures — including a plaque dated 1846 that names the original owner as Capt. Samuel Littleton — with her best friend, Allison, whose family of innkeepers provide Jane with warmth she doesn’t get at home.

Jane then forgets the purple house for over a decade as she moves away from Awadapquit for college, grad school and a career as a women’s studies archivist at the Schlesinger Library in Cambridge, Mass. “Throughout her 20s, she occasionally went on dates, most of them bad and made bearable only by copious amounts of alcohol.” It’s not until she’s 30 and bringing home her boyfriend, David, to introduce him to her family, that she revisits the purple house. All seems promising as the couple “walked to the edge of the cliff, hand in hand, pretending the property was theirs”; but “a fear tugged at Jane’s pocket, whispering that she had only wandered temporarily into somebody else’s lovely life.”

Jane returns to Boston with David, but the house isn’t done with her. Ten years later, an alcohol-related incident has created chaos in both her career and her relationship. Her mother’s death creates an excuse for her to escape to Awadapquit, where she works on cleaning out the family home. Soon the purple house beckons her again when she is hired by Genevieve, the present owner, to discover its history over the centuries, and the possible identity of the ghost appearing to Genevieve’s young son.

Jane’s research is a portal that opens up the novel to aspects of Maine life that are not on the typical tourist trail. Jane learns about the Indigenous Abenaki people in the state and their early engagements and clashes with white settlers, as well as contemporary Native concerns about their tribal status and land and water rights.