Introduction

When their parents die within a year of each other, eighteen-year-old Warren and twenty-year-old Joan are left alone in their small coastal town in Maine, no longer as a son and daughter but only as a brother and sister.

As they attempt both to grieve and grow up, things become more complicated -- their father's business partner strips them of their rightful financial interest in the family plant nursery, and a suspicious aunt and uncle suddenly reappear in their lives. As Joan turns to her ex-boyfriend for comfort, Warren finds himself transfixed with a beautiful single mother from town.

A moving story of two young people's struggle to make a place and a home for themselves, On This Day is debut novelist Nathaniel Bellows's lyrical consideration of memory -- the necessity of facing a family's dark past in order to begin a new life.

Editorial Review

Nathaniel Bellows's first novel, On This Day, follows a pair of orphans through a few painful months of grief. Warren and Joan are twentysomething siblings whose parents have recently died--their father had cancer and their mother committed suicide. Warren narrates this tale, which is built from small events: he fights with his best friend; he and his sister are besieged by their aunt and uncle with addled kindness; he talks with his boss at the library about maybe going to college. What's surprising is the lightness and cleanliness with which Bellows delivers this sad story. Joan and Warren are well-defined and believable--their dialogue, especially, is deftly written and darkly funny. Bellows beautifully captures the subterranean currents of humor and hatred that inform sibling conversation. In the end, the novel takes on an almost metaphorical size. Making Joan and Warren orphans gives them greater definition as siblings: they are no longer a daughter and son; they are only a sister and brother. This promising first novel limns that relationship with grace. --Claire Dederer

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