Remembering Blue: A Novel

"This is how I came to be more than a flicker in the world's peripheral vision. How I came to respect and value family. How I moved to a deeper understanding of past wrongs. How I began to approach the future with both anticipation and forgiveness. A stranger walked into a store..."

From Connie May Fowler, author of the bestselling and award-winning Before Women Had Wings, comes a maritime saga and extraordinary love story between Mattie Blue and her husband, Nick, a fisherman on a small Florida island. Recently widowed and filled with grief, Mattie spins a tale of her beloved husband--his birth, his death, his love of the sea, his haunted fear of a family legend of drowning, and their romantic, unflagging devotion to each other.

Setting out to build a new life far removed from her lonely childhood, twenty-two-year-old Mattie expects another dull, efficient working day at the Suwannee Swifty convenience store when Proteus Nicholas Blue stops in and changes her life. Two days after leaving his large, nurturing Greek family on the small island of Lethe, Nick believes he has given up the sea, with its magic and its danger, for good, but their love transforms them both. As she struggles to build a new life--first with and later without Nick, surrounded by her new relatives--we discover along with her the infinite sources of strength to be found in familiar places, the comfort of family, and the healing power of memory.

Connie May Fowler is that rare author who is both elegant in her writing and passionate in her storytelling. Although her latest novel begins in the aftermath of a tragic event, her accomplished storytelling reveals how the life-affirming humor, joy, and incredible love between two people can make them so much more than they were alone. An exploration of grief and transcendence, Remembering Blue is as much about the allure and mysteries of the village as about the people who inhabit it. It is an unforgettable, beautifully told story that will affirm Connie May Fowler's place at the forefront of American writers.


Mattie Fiona Blue, recently widowed and filled with grief, spins a tale of her beloved husband, Nick--his birth, his death, his love of the sea, his haunted fear of a family legend of drowning, and their romantic, unflagging devotion to each other. In Mattie's courageous and stubborn telling of the story, we find REMEMBERING BLUE's true power: its quiet insistence that the living and the dead, the past and the present, the ancient and the yet-to-be, reside within us, coexisting, via memory, story, and myth.

While mourning Nick, Mattie tells us of her own life as she journeys from the loneliness of a broken home and disapproving mother to the chaotic, mythic, abundant sphere of Nick Blue and his sprawling Greek-American fishing family, whose ties to the sea extend across generations, continents, and time. On the bridgeless island of Lethe, Nick's family's home, in the midst of isolation and nature's bounty, Mattie comes into her own, navigating through the complex joys and demands of her new family even as she begins to see with wiser eyes the ocean's duality.

An exploration of grief and transcendence, REMEMBERING BLUE is as much about the allure and mysteries of the village as about the people who live there. It is an unforgettable, beautifully told story that will affirm Connie May Fowler's place at the forefront of American writers. -->