Gravesend light - david payne

Joey Madden, the eleven-year-old narrator of Ruin Creek , is Joe now, a twenty-eight-year-old, Duke-trained anthropologist back on the Outer Banks doing ethnographic fieldwork in Little Roanoke, a traditional fishing community under stress from modernization.

Attending services at Little Roanokes evangelical church, Joe secures a berth aboard a commercial trawl boat called the Fathers Price .

Between trips to sea, Joe crosses paths with Day Shaughnessey, MD, an OB/GYN whose provision of birth and abortion services to local island women has put her in the crosshairs of the conservative community Joe has come to study.

In the same family summer house where Joe once lived the painful end of his parents marriage, his relationship with Day now begins.

As they converge romantically, however, Joe and Day increasingly diverge on politics.

If those who cant remember the past are condemned to repeat it, its Joe and Days fate-and Joes, in particular-- to learn that those who cant forget the past are oftentimes condemned to repeat it, too.