Author Website
Publisher
Where else can you find my books? Gibson’s Bookstore (Concord), Waterstreet Bookstore (Exeter), Reedmor Books (Portsmouth), Perkins Cove Bookshop (Ogunquit, ME)
Ann Joslin Williams
Ann Joslin Williams is the author of the novels Skyland and Down From Cascom Mountain, and a collection of linked short stories The Woman in the Woods. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, the New Hampshire Writers’ Project Literary Awards, and the Stegner Program at Stanford University. Her writing has appeared in many journals including The Sun, Carve, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review and elsewhere. She is an associate professor emerita of English at the University of New Hampshire.
Books
The Woman in the Woods
A collection of linked stories by Ann Joslin Williams.
Down From Cascom Mountain
Mary Walker returns to the New Hampshire mountains of her childhood with her new husband, ready to rebuild her family’s house on Cascom Mountain and start their life together. But in a single, devastating moment during a routine hike, she watches helplessly as her husband falls to his death, leaving her utterly alone in the wilderness that once felt like home.
Struggling with sudden widowhood in the isolated mountain community, Mary finds unexpected solace among the seasonal crew that maintains the trails and lodge—young people who gather each night to share ghost stories and songs. She forms a deep connection with Callie, a sensitive sixteen-year-old who sees past Mary’s grief, and with Tobin, the brilliant but awkward boy she once babysat, who now keeps silent vigil on her roof as she attempts to repair more than just her family’s house.
When her husband’s estranged father arrives on the mountain, seeking some belated connection to his lost son, Mary must confront not only her own grief but the complicated legacy of family wounds. As the small community rallies around her, Mary discovers that healing comes not from escaping the past but from embracing the rugged beauty and harsh realities of the place that shaped her.
Set against the unforgiving terrain of New Hampshire’s mountains, Down from Cascom Mountain is a powerful exploration of how we rebuild our lives after loss—and how the land we love can break us and make us whole again. Ann Joslin Williams, writing in the fictional world first created by her father, National Book Award winner Thomas Williams, announces herself as a formidable novelist in her own right.
Skyland
When Celia is murdered by a troubled young man from across the street, her husband Henry and daughters Nora and Lucy are left to navigate the unthinkable in their small town of Kittery, Maine. Desperate to help his daughters heal, Henry sends the girls to spend the summer at Skyland Farm, a remote artists’ retreat in the New Hampshire mountains run by his beloved cousin Franny.
But the girls, feeling abandoned, struggle to find their footing among the resident artists. Nora grapples with her complicated feelings about Blake, the young man who destroyed their lives, while forming a new bond with a young sculptor. Lucy, the sole witness to the murder, retreats into silence and the mysterious world of a painting above her bed. Back in Maine, Henry battles his own grief and faces his greatest test when he becomes entangled with Blake’s alcoholic mother, threatening his twelve years of sobriety.
As the family struggles separately with their trauma, the buried details of that terrible day slowly surface. When Nora makes a desperate midnight drive home to confront her father, their journey becomes a reckoning that will either destroy what remains of their family or finally allow them to face their loss together.
Set against the rugged beauty of coastal Maine and the mountainous landscape of New Hampshire, Skyland reveals how art, nature, and unexpected friendships can slowly guide us back from the brink―and how families can find their way to one another even after the unthinkable.