Frank Conroy initial visited Nantucket having a gang of university close friends in 1955. They came on a whim, and for Conroy it was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with this “small, calm oasis in the sea.” This publication, part travel diary, part memoir, is usually a hauntingly evocative and personal journey through Nantucket: its sweeping dunes, durable moors, remote seashores, secret fishing places, and hidden forests and cranberry bogs. Admirers of Conroy’s traditional and acclaimed memoir Stop-Time will once again about Time and Tide: A Walk Through Nantucket delight in what Adam Atlas, writing in the New York Times, called his “genius for close observation.”

In Time and Tide, Conroy recounts the island’s history in the glory days of the whaling boom for this, when tourism dominates. He vividly evokes the clash of cultures between the operating class and the super-rich, using the delicate ecology of the island always in the total amount. But most interesting of all, he tells his very own story–of playing jazz piano in the island’s pubs; of raising a barn in the early ’60s by using a couple of hippie carpenters; of leasing a vintage, failed club with two isle pals and making it the Roadhouse, a golf club “that was to be ours, the year-rounders, also to hell with the summer people.” There’s a wonderful tale of his first golf game, played on a historical nine-hole course with two friends, a part-time sommelier and a constructor in the South who created the one-handed pepper mill.

This is a book that revels in friendship, music, history, as well as the gorgeous landscape of a distinctive American place, and is a wonderful work by one of our greatest contemporary writers.