2008

Island readers anticipated Philip Craig’s annual mystery novels like their first summer swim. The author died this year, leaving one last novel finished. Here is an exclusive excerpt from that book, Vineyard Chill, printed with permission from Scribner.

It was a bright, snowless mid-January day, chilly but not cold, Just right for a drive on the Chappy beaches. We could enjoy the ride and bring back several big, industrial-strength trash bags full of seaweed for the garden. Two good reasons to go. So we went.

grapes

Gardening expert and author C.L. Fornari will launch her new book, A Garden Lover’s Martha’s Vineyard, with a wine and cheese signing reception open to all on Thursday, June 12, from 5 to 7 p.m. at Polly Hill Arboretum in West Tisbury. Gazette readers can get a taste of the full-color book — which features Island gardens large and small, from formal layouts in Edgartown to Victorian-inspired gardens in Oak Bluffs to casual up-Island gardens — from the excerpt below, about a Chilmark couple growing a vineyard on the Vineyard.

Even if you don’t call your brother by the name of a different vegetable every day (Broccoli, Turnip, or, whenever he’s being nice, Pea Pod), many readers know what the quirky, crazy-lovable third grader Clementine means when she says, “Spectacularful ideas are always sproinging up in my brain.”

plants

What makes the Vineyard a special place for growing plants? C.L. Fornari, writer of garden information and radio host of the Saturday morning program Garden Line on WXTK (95.1 FM) is “happy to say that gardening and agriculture on the Island is thriving.”

Speaking to a packed audience at the Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club April meeting, Ms. Fornari presented a slide show of selected photographs from her soon-to-be-published book, A Garden Lover’s Martha’s Vineyard.

book

Why do some washashores to the Island stay ashore while others drift away?

The question had settled in Island author Elaine Pace’s mind for a couple of years. She spent a year talking with people who stayed and the result is Island Home, the stories of 14 pilgrims who visited, then chose to live on the Vineyard.

Subtitled Why People Come to Martha’s Vineyard and Why They Stay, the self-published book hits Island bookstores today. The book joins Island, a Memoir, Ms. Pace’s first book, published in 2005.

Vineyard-born author A.F. Cook (known to many Islanders as the artist Anne Cook) recently published her first book, Democrats in the Red Zone: an Independent Voter’s Take on the Game of Political Perception. The book looks at the Democratic Party’s strategic failures through the lens of a football fan — specifically, a longtime New England Patriots fan.

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