Mallow Island

Mallow Island, South Carolina, is the primary setting for the novel’s events, a small, isolated, coastal community populated by a number of vacationers and misfits. The town has a kitschy, seaside appearance, and is populated by unique beauties, such as the native mallow plant and the local dellawisps, small, sparrow-like birds that populate the town’s brugmansia trees. Mallow Island’s remove from the continent helps imbue it with a sleepy, surreal, out-of-time feeling that dovetails nicely with the novel’s themes of ghosts, magic, memory, and recovery. It is charming and enigmatic, mysterious and fraught, and its sleepy exterior belies a complex, checkered history and great deal of anguish on the part of its residents.

Norrie Beach

Norrie Beach, California, is the town on the west coast that Oliver Lime exiles himself to after leaving Mallow Island to escape his mother. Though elements of Norrie...