Book Description

The Lobsterman's Daughter is a tale of murder and deceit in five generations of a Maine family, the Markhams. The story's narrator, Henrietta Markham, is a recent Harvard graduate, who submits an early version as her honors thesis and claims her work is an actual history of her family. She tells the story in her own voice and the conjured voices of her relatives, both living and dead. After graduation, in Barcelona she faces her own deceit in omitting her sins from the chronicle and adds a journal that documents her bizarre attempts at expiation and atonement. Markham sends the new version back to her advisor and asks that it be published as her final word on her family's history. In an epilogue Lieberman's author struggles unsuccessfully to regain control of a narrator who is at once incorrigible and essential. Ultimately the novel asks us to consider our capacity for evil, what it means to atone, and where forgiveness and grace reside.