Reading & Conversation: Samantha Browning Shea "Marrow" (w/ Clare Beams)

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We are thrilled to welcome Samantha Browning Shea to White Whale to celebrate her debut work of fiction, Marrow. Darkly propulsive and deliciously addictive, this novel transports readers to a small island off the coast of Maine, where a fertility coven has done the impossible: given childless women the chance to become mothers. Samantha will be in conversation with local writer, Clare Beams.

A searing take on femininity and power, Marrow transports readers to a small island off the coast of Maine, where a coven has done the seemingly impossible.

The day Oona was kicked out of her mother’s coven, she gave up on her dreams of harnessing the witchcraft that was her birthright. Years later, she’s carved out an ordinary life with her husband, though she is filled with a longing she can barely name. If she could only become a mother, then—according to island lore—she will come into her magic.

But after years of being unable to carry a pregnancy to term, Oona begins to feel desperate. Without the money to seek medical treatment, she decides she must return to the rugged, windswept island where she was raised—and to her dark, enigmatic mother . . . a witch who gives childless women the chance to become mothers.

Oona returns under the cover of anonymity, hoping for an answer. But, despite a celebrity clientele and a long wait-list, there are dark forces at work on the island, and as her time there grows more harrowing, the truth threatens to come to light. How far will Oona go to access the power her mother commands?

Tender and intense, witchy and wise, and written in prose that glitters and seethes, Marrow is a gripping novel about the complex bonds between mothers and daughters, about what we must believe in order to imagine a future for ourselves, and what we must let go in order to fully live it.

"Marrow is a novel with its own weather, an entrancing and eerie tale of longing, regret, and secrets, with a revelation that continues to haunt me." —Megha Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning

"This haunting novel swims in the deep, murky water of motherhood, friendship, circles of care and the shadows that hover beneath and between the most hopeful of projects. Life is never only a miracle—it is also heartbreak, despair and betrayal. Marrow is rich and complicated and very, very real." —Ramona Ausubel, bestselling author of The Last Animal

"An absorbing, atmospheric, rich, feminist and witchy novel—what more could we ask for? I became completely entangled in the saltmarsh of the island of Marrow and all the secrets, fierce hope, and desperation that the island holds. Samantha Shea has created magic here." —Annie Hartnett, author of The Road to Tender Hearts

"Samantha Browning Shea has given us a dark and delicious tale of mystery and witchcraft. Suspenseful and emotionally charged, Marrow is woven through with guilt and secrets, herbs and incantations, and—most powerfully—all the magic of coming into one's own power.” —Clare Beams, author of The Garden

Samantha Browning Shea is an author and the vice president of Georges Borchardt, Inc. literary agency. A graduate of Colgate University, Samantha lives in Connecticut with her husband and their two daughters. Marrow is her debut novel.

Clare Beams is the author of the novels The Garden (Doubleday, 2024) and The Illness Lesson (Doubleday, 2020), both New York Times Editors’ Choices, and the story collection We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books 2016), which won the Bard Fiction Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in One Story, Conjunctions, Ecotone, and elsewhere, and she was a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates/New Literary Project Prize. She lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the MFA programs at the University of Pittsburgh and Randolph College.

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