George Michelsen Foy is a friend and near neighbor who is one of the best novelists I’ve read when it comes to portraying life on Cape Cod. I’m a fan of his maritime writing, especially his novel Mettle, and his nonfiction writing about the sea such as Run the Storm (about the El Faro disaster) and Finding North. His latest novel is The Winterpoor (2025, Sea Crow Press). It’s a timely, sad, and compelling elegy to those Cape Codders who live on the margins of the mansions and the resorts; the homeless, the poor, and the lost souls pulled down by the peninsula’s rush to the bottom as developers, realtors, planners, and politicians line their pockets and milk the place to death.
The book is a delight for anyone who grew up in Barnstable, affectionately name checking local characters and places with a true inside eye. The story stars a moonshine distilling artist, a Big Lebowski hero named Murdo Cahoon Peters with deep roots in the town, on a quest to restore the houseboat barge of a forgotten artist, to end a dead marriage, save a raccoon, and befriend a lost boy falling through the cracks.
The chapters are interspersed with poetic digressions into the death of a salt pond and the seasonal cycle of migration and spawning of flounders, eels, fiddler crabs, and Arctic Terns. Foy laments the Rape of the Cape without belaboring the obvious and lets the corrupt machinations of the Real Estate Lobby and the bumbling management of the town — especially the village of Hyannis — speak for itself.
The Winterpoor brought back memories of John Casey’s 1989 National Book Award winning novel Spartina, and then exceeded it. Reading it from cover to cover on the last day of summer made me shudder at the coming cold, and grateful to live in a place as beautiful and fragile as I do.
The Winterpoor can be purchased direct from the publisher, Sea Crow Press or Amazon. George signed copies last Friday, (9/19/25) at Titcomb’s Bookshop, 432 Route 6A in Sandwich, MA.
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