Pebble & Dove

Shortlisted for the 2024 Hamilton Literary Award for Fiction •   Named a Best Book of the Year So Far by Audible

In the tradition of Karen Russell’ s Swamplandia! , a once-famous but now-abandoned aquarium-in-a-ship in Florida is the captivating backdrop for a novel of family secrets and dysfunction, and the ways in which it can sometimes take an animal to remind us how to be human.

This is the story of a family falling apart, only to be brought back together again by an unlikely champion— a 1, 000-pound aquatic mammal named Pebble.  

Lauren’ s life is a mess. She has a storage unit full of candles she can’ t sell, a growing mountain of debt, and a teenage daughter, Dove, who barely speaks to her. Then her husband sends her a text that changes everything.   Eager to escape her problems, she drives herself and Dove south to her late mother’ s rundown trailer  in Florida. While keeping her eccentric new neighbours at  Swaying Palms  at bay, Lauren begins to untangle the truth about  her estranged mother. How did world-famous portrait photographer Imogen Starr end up at Swaying Palms? And what happened to her fortune and her photographs?

Meanwhile, Dove has secrets of her own. A mysterious photograph leads her to discover the abandoned Flamingo Key Aquarium and Tackle, where she meets Pebble, the world’ s oldest manatee in captivity. It is Pebble, a former star attraction, and her devoted caretaker, Ray, who will hold the key to helping Lauren and Dove come to terms with Imogen’ s unexpected legacy.  

Darkly funny and sharply observed, Pebble & Dove is a moving novel about the complicated relationship between mothers and daughters, and learning how to choose between what’ s worth saving and what needs to be let go.