HAPPIER THAN THIS DAY AND TIME

"A major contribution to the preservation of the lore and heritage of the Outer Banks." -- David Stick "The voices ring with authenticity." -- Paul Clancy, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot How much would you give to talk quietly for just one hour with your great-grandmother? Most likely, almost anything. But probably you can't buy it at any price. Time's torrent rushes by, isolating us like a hurricane-driven tide, the rising sea cutting us off from those who went before. It bears away the old voices and the old ways. Bears away too much of what we loved, and what we realize, too late, we still desperately need. This book’s a bridge to that past. In a series of interviews conducted in the late 1970's and early 1980's, eight old people recounted their lives on a string of isolated islands of the North Carolina coast. The Outer Banks are a hundred-mile arch of barrier islands, from a few thousand feet to three miles across, punctuated by narrow inlets to the Atlantic. Low, backed by wide brackish sounds, they’re lands of the margin; half-land, half-sea; shaped by the eternal struggle of sea-currents, vulnerable to hurricane and war. These nine survivors tell of childhood, courting, marriage, and children; of hurricanes, depressions, wars, and death; of faith, doubt, love, and fear. They watched the Wright brothers fly; saw U-boats torpedo ships close offshore; dealt with blindness and heartbreak and shipwreck. Then, near the end of their voyages, they lingered for a little while to tell us of The Way Things Were. And they'll tell us more -- if we’ll listen. With a little urging, they'll share their thoughts on the ultimate questions; good and evil, youth and age, triumph and suffering. From their first word, they cast a spell. Welcome to the past. -------------------------------- David Poyer is an internationally known novelist with close ties to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, to which this book is a tribute. Millions of copies of his nearly fifty books are in print, including national bestsellers and such favorites as the Civil War at Sea Trilogy, the Hemlock County novels, the Tiller Galloway diving adventures, and the Dan Lenson novels of the modern Navy. His work has been published in Italian, Dutch, Hungarian, Japanese, Serbo-Croatian, and Spanish. Poyer lives on Virginia’s Eastern Shore and teaches as core faculty at the Ossabaw Writers Retreat and other venues. More at .