- DESCRIPTION
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- EDITORIAL REVIEWS
Sometimes all you need is one person to really see you.
Piper Parrish's life on Frick Island - a tiny, remote town smack in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay - is nearly perfect. Well, aside from one pesky detail: Her darling husband, Tom, is dead. When Tom's crab boat capsized and his body wasn't recovered, Piper, rocked to the core, did a most peculiar thing: carried on as if her husband was not only still alive, but right there beside her, cooking him breakfast, walking him to the docks each morning, meeting him for their standard Friday night dinner date at the One-Eyed Crab. And what were the townspeople to do but go along with their beloved widowed Piper?
Anders Caldwell's career is not going well. A young ambitious journalist, he'd rather hoped he'd be a national award-winning podcaster by now, rather than writing fluff pieces for a small town newspaper. But when he gets an assignment to travel to the remote Frick Island and cover their boring annual Cake Walk fundraiser, he stumbles upon a much more fascinating tale: an entire town pretending to see and interact with a man who does not actually exist. Determined it's the career-making story he's been needing for his podcast, Anders returns to the island to begin covert research and spend more time with the enigmatic Piper--but he has no idea out of all the lives he's about to upend, it's his that will change the most.
USA Today bestselling author Colleen Oakley delivers an unforgettable love story about an eccentric community, a grieving widow, and an outsider who slowly learns that sometimes faith is more important than the facts.
Colleen Oakley is the USA Today bestselling author of You Were There Too, Close Enough to Touch and Before I Go. Her books have been named best books by People, Us Weekly, Library Journal and Real Simple, and have been long-listed for the Southern Book Prize. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband, four kids and the world's biggest lapdog.
"A powerhouse of a writer, full of creativity (an invisible husband?!) and the talent to back it up. Here, she takes something magical and wonderful --- an entire town acting on behalf of one person --- and combines it beautifully with the intimate nature of grief and the need to hide from the truth. The result is something I don’t believe I ever could have imagined before reading this delightful novel, but it is the kind of story that I feel I can recommend to anyone. Oakley balances the more unbelievable aspects of her book with a vivid and grounding community, and her characters are each as believable and endearing as the next, without a single misstep in the bunch. I love the kind of setting that acts as its own character, and Frick Island does exactly that. Even when the island is stormswept, dilapidated and resistant to change, it demands respect and admiration, and each scene reads as if Oakley is writing from the parlor of Mrs. Olecki’s B&B or sitting on the marina under BobDan’s watchful gaze." - BookReporter
"Fans of the delightfully bizarre and quaintly humorous will love Oakley’s hopeful tale about the powerful bond of community and how far people will go to protect someone they love." - Library Journal
"In the quirky latest from Oakley, an outsider learns of strange happenings on a remote Maryland island." - Publishers Weekly
"A lively, heartwarming story with eccentric characters depicting the lengths a small community will go to in support of one of its own." - New York Journal of Books
"Sweet, quirky, surprising, and altogether lovely, The Invisible Husband of Frick Island is everything I long for in a book. I fell in love with Oakley's sparkling prose, charming characters, and quaint island setting. This is a story I can't wait to revisit, again and again. A must read." - Emily Henry, New York Times bestselling author of Beach Read
