Margreete's Harbor begins with a fire: Margreete Bright, a fiercely independent, thrice-widowed woman living on her own in a rambling house near the Maine coast, forgets a hot pan on the stovetop and nearly burns her place down. When Margreete calls her daughter, Liddie, to confess, Liddie realizes that her mother can no longer live alone. She, her husband Harry, and their children, Eva and Bernie, move from a settled life in Michigan across the country to Margreete's isolated home and begin a new life. Margreete's Harbor tells the story of ten years in the history of a family: a novel of small moments, intimate betrayals, arrivals and disappearances that coincide with America during the late 1950s through the turbulent 1960s. Liddie, a professional cellist, struggles to find space for her music in a marriage that increasingly confines her; Harry's critical approach to the growing war in Vietnam endangers his new position as a high school history teacher; Bernie and Eva and a new sister, Gretchen, begin to find their own identities; and Margreete slowly descends into a private world of memories that overtake her dwindling sense of the present.-- Front cover flap.