NH's 2022 Route One Read

Route One Reads is a virtual reading trip along Route One. For this year's summer road trip the Center for the Book in each state along Route One was asked to select a work of "literary fiction"

According to Joyce Saricks in Readers’ Advisory Service in the Public Library:

Literary fiction is “complex, literate, multilayered novels that wrestle with universal dilemmas.” Appeal factors for LF include a character-centered story (as opposed to a plot-driven one) and very strong character development, both in the main character and in secondary characters.

For your summer reading pleasure we selected a title that we felt checked off all the boxes for literary fiction: The Den, by Abi Maxwell. 

With echoes of The Scarlet Letter, this is a luminous, hypnotic story of youth, sex, and power that tells of two young women who find themselves ostracized from the same small New England community for the same reasons–though they are separated by 150 years. 

In addition to The Den, Abi Maxwell is the author of the novel Lake People. Her memoir, One Day I’ll Grow Up, I’ll Be A Beautiful Woman, will be published in the summer of 2023. She lives with her husband and daughter in New Hampshire.