Goodnight Stranger

Island life plays a leading role in this debut novel

Miciah Bay Gault is an island girl. She spent some of her young life on Sanibel, where her mother, Chris, grew up and her grandparents, Joe and Mary Bell Gault, founded and ran the

Seahorse Shops on the east end. She also spent many years near Chesapeake

Bay, then on Cape Cod. She knows what it’s like to be surrounded by water.

She has transferred that knowledge—and that atmosphere of island isolation—to the pages of her first novel,

Goodnight Stranger, published in 2019 by Park Row Books. While first-time novelists struggle for author endorsements, Gault couldn’t ask for better blurbs on her cover. Topping the list is

George Saunders, author most recently of Lincoln in the Bardo and considered by literary critics to be among the best living American writers. “Somewhere the ghosts of Shirley Jackson and the Henry James who wrote The Turn of the Screw are smiling, because a wildly talented young writer has joined their lineage,” he wrote for the cover of Goodnight Stranger.

With that kind of recommendation, it is with a great deal of anticipation that you open this book, and it draws you right into the lives of Lydia and Lucas Moore, twins who have spent all of their 20-plus years on Wolf Island, which Gault places near Cape Cod, calling it the smaller and plainer cousin of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

Lydia and Lucas began life as triplets, having lost their brother, called Baby B, when they were just a few months old. The loss of Baby B still hangs over their lives in a profound way, as Lydia and Lucas try to make ends meet in their aging and deteriorating family home. Both their parents are gone now, too.

This in itself has the makings of an absorbing plot, but Gault shakes things up by having the stranger of the title walk into their lives one day, at first seeming to offer a ray of sunshine into their otherwise gray existence.

It is soon apparent that the stranger is not exactly who he says he is. Lydia starts to investigate, and the book is off and running.

There are struggles, mystery, romance, a satisfying conclusion— the makings of a worthy story. Above it all floats the atmosphere of island living, which Gault has no tr ouble portraying as a central element of this engaging book.

Gault knows what it’s like to be surrounded by water. She has transferred that knowledge—and that atmosphere of island isolation—to the pages of her first novel.