Product Description

Mado has been adrift for too long. After ten years in Paris, she returns to the small island of Le Devin, the home that has haunted her since she left.

Le Devin is shaped somewhat like a sleeping woman. At her head is the village of Les Salants, while its more prosperous rival, La Houssinière, lies at her feet. Yet even though you can walk from one to the other in an hour, they are worlds apart. And now Mado is back in Les Salants hoping to reconcile with her estranged father. But what she doesn't realize is that it is not only her father whose trust she must regain.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #471549 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-01
• Released on: 2003-08-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Amazon.com
After three novels which centered around gastronomic pleasures, Joanne Harris's Coastliners focuses on more astringent joys. Sea, gritty sand, and adverse weather conditions replace Chocolat, Blackberry Wine, and Five Quarters of the Orange. Set on a small, blustery fishing island off the coast of France, it tells the story of Mado, a young woman who returns to her childhood home to find the local community torn apart by family feuds, bad tides, and murky political machinations.

Passionate, stubborn Mado, whose "head is full of rocks," tries to save the livelihoods of the villagers of Les Salants by urging them to work together to save the beach from erosion, both natural and man-made. The villagers, written with endearing panache by Harris, are an eccentric, curmudgeonly bunch, who eventually cooperate with the help of Flynn, a charismatic stranger with a shady past. He's not the only man of mystery in Mado's life; her father, taciturn Grosjean, has a secretive heart that's as "prickly and tightly layered as an artichoke," and local, wealthy businessman Brismand also seems to be hiding something. Mado does her best to unravel these mysteries, while attempting to keep a hold on her own sense of self in the claustrophobic, close community. It's not only the shore line that takes a buffeting. The villagers and the island are so vividly described that it's impossible not to become engrossed in Mado's story. Coastliners is a book about longing to belong, and Joanne Harris charts that emotional voyage compellingly. --Eithne Farry, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly
Family history meets village rivalry in Harris's poignant fourth novel, an understated passion play set on the provincial French island of Le Devin. Madeleine Prasteau leaves her Paris apartment to return to the island village of Les Salants, where she discovers that her father, a widowed boat owner, is going downhill along with the village itself as the rival town of La HoussiniŠre grows and prospers. Despite her father's chilly greeting, Madeleine spruces up the family home, and when she meets an attractive, mysterious stranger named Flynn she gets involved in a project to save Les Salants by building a homemade reef to restore the fast-eroding beach. The project gets complicated when Madeleine realizes that Flynn has ties to Brismand, a rival of her father's, who controls local commerce in La HoussiniŠre. The reef project succeeds, but with a bitter aftertaste when Madeleine's older sister, Adrienne, moves back to the island and her father becomes infatuated with Adrienne's children. Sibling rivalry fades to the background when Madeleine learns that Flynn's ties to Brismand extend into her own family history, and she discovers that Flynn was an integral part of a romantic triangle involving her father and Brismand. Harris develops her beguiling story in layers, drawing Madeleine into the village life she loves and loathes while exploring the nuances of island living. Despite the narrowly focused setting, Harris exposes a wide range of passions and emotions as Madeline gets involved with Flynn against the effective backdrop of the various family and village rivalries. This book lacks the lurid erotic power of Chocolat, but Harris compensates for the lowered levels of passion and eros by writing with power and grace about the family ties that bind.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Madeleine is out of sorts, so she returns home to the little French island of Le Devin, itself seemingly lost in time. But her presence effects just the sort of miraculous renewal one would expect from the author of Chocolat. The six-city author tour is no surprise.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Images, feelings, and relationships in sure hands
This work by the author of Chocolat, which I thoroughly enjoyed and was my impetus for picking up this book, brings several similar themes here. Among them are life in a small town, family relations, and the role of a good bright woman who is an outsider (in this story, a local who is returning after time in the big city and so has lost much of her insider status). After having lived in Paris with her now deceased mother, Mado returns to the French island of her birth, small enough to harbor two communities that are fierce rivals. The human focus is largely Mado's relationships with her family and the neighbors as well as the business leader of the rival community, Brismand, who owns its hotel. Also deeply involved is another outsider, Flynn, who is light-hearted and extremely mysterious. When Mado's community, Les Salants, is threatened by developments in rival La Houssiniere, Flynn leads them in response. Sort of. The citizens of Les Salants rally, but Flynn's role becomes murky. The relations of the people are foremost here, and nature, personal histories, community rivalry, and religion (superstition?) play roles also in how the characters relate. Harris' writing is vivid in both the images and feelings she elicits, seemingly effortlessly. Mado is a rich and deep character, complex, real, and enjoyable. The events ring lifelike and make for a very pleasurable read in Harris' gentle and capable hand. Read it. You'll be glad you did.

A Good Beach Read
The smell of sea and rotting fish, eroded beaches void of life, decaying sea cabins covered with moss, crabby neighbors, a distant father, and a mysterious, uncertain lover- defiantly not your perfect vision of a homecoming welcome. Yet this is what the main character in Joanne Harris' novel "Coastliners" receives when she returns to her childhood village of Les Salants on the island of Le Devin; and ironically, this is all she needs. Madeleine (Mado) Prasteau is a passionate, stubborn, artistic, and driven woman. She is determined to revive the small village which is being torn apart by ancient family feuds and a growing problem of beach erosion. However, the situation in Le Salants is only the secondary part of her worries; Mado's father GrosJean Prasteau is a distant, withdrawn, and embittered man. Driven into seclusion when Mado and her mother leave the island for Paris ten years ago, GrosJean has fallen into a mental decay with the years- much like the physical decay of the island he lives on. Resolved to help both her father and the quarrelsome community, Mado finds help in the charming, handsome, and mysterious character of an Englishman named Flynn. Together they bring a new sense of camaraderie to the villagers and to Mado's detached family. But when a Flynn's murky past comes into full view his identity might shatter his relationship with Mado and the very existence of Les Salants.

Though this novel is not as strong as her best selling "Chocolat", Joanne Harris' "Coastliners" still contains a good plot and determined characters that face some type of adversity. Filled with exceptional images of the sea and details of life on a small fishing island, "Coastliners" will definitely have a different, edgy, and more robust feel than the rest of Harris' novels. It's mysterious and often cryptic characters will catch your attention immediately and keep you reading, hoping to find the secrets they house within themselves. "Coastliners" is a good novel for a light-summer-beach-read (you could probably finish it in two days), but do not expect to find the literary richness found in "Chocolat".

These are the only two setbacks I found in the novel...
First I was a little disheartened to find no cooking aspect in this novel. I really enjoy Harris' creativity with recipes in her other novels and I think they are a great and defining characteristic of her literary style. I found in "Coastliners" that Harris was more concerned with imagery of the sea and sea life than the many delicious recipes that contain sea creatures.
My second complain about the novel is that it tended to ramble on in certain sections, leaving me slightly disinterested. Harris' use of multiple characters and situations was excellent because it gave the story a true-to-life feel. But it takes time and space to develop each character to fruition, and many times you have to sacrifice something to do this aspect justice. This resulted in the novel's tendency to drift off a bit and to loose track of its main plot and purpose. A great example of this is during the last 60 or so pages of the novel the drama of Flynn's identity and mysterious connection with Mado's father and the towns rival Brismand is made. At best this entire situation was solved within three very small, very complicated chapters. I think this would have been a great characteristic to develop withing these three characters throughout the novel, since during those few pages it was a very IMPORTANT part of the plot. Instead, it seemed as if Harris threw this in at the last moment as an after thought or was too busy developing everything else about the characters and forgot this important aspect.

Still this novel was a good read and I recommend it to any fan of Joanne Harris' writing who is willing to experience a different side of the author or to anyone who enjoys reading about life at sea.

genuine souls.......................
In a story that is set on a small island, a young woman returns home after the death of her mother, to try to understand her father's life and come to terms with her own past and future.
The story takes place amidst a rivalry between the villages at opposite ends of the island. It seems that ultimately one village will thrive, but only at the expense of the other. This seems to be the case between Mado and her sister also.
The villagers are pitted against each other generation after generation in a manner that is mirrored by the characters, Mado's father and his brother, Mado and her sister, husbands and wives and even the religious become opponents to each other.
The descriptions of the coastline, the sea and the villages is so real and clear you can feel the salty breezes. The people are genuine souls that can move your heart.
As the truth about Mado's life is realized, she sees that there is an important reason that everything returns to it's beginnings and that lessons in life will be repeated until they are truly learned.