When Heather Donnelly drives into Thistledown Cove on a gray afternoon in April, she is twenty-six years old, three years out of the Pennsylvania household she fled, and freshly grieving the grandmother who taught her silversmithing in a Portland studio across three quiet years. The keys to the old Aldercott building are in her coat pocket. Her grandmother's tools are in the back of the car. She has come to a small Maine town where she knows no one, to open a shop, and to begin.

She does not expect what she finds. A grocer's daughter with a quick laugh who decides, within four minutes, to be her friend. A historical-society matriarch who recognizes Heather's grandmother's hand on a piece of silver and speaks carefully about what else she recognizes. A Welsh stonemason at the top of Rowan Street who knew Heather's grandmother once at a craft fair forty-five years ago and has been waiting, without knowing he was waiting, for her granddaughter to arrive. A small woman in lichen-colored wool who sits cross-legged on the workbench eating Heather's toast.

And, at the edge of the woods, a tall man in a slate-gray coat who inclines his head to her across an alley one evening in late spring. He is older than the cottage at the top of the street, and older than the town, and he keeps a different time than she does. He has noticed her work.

A slow novel about a woman remaking her life inside a town that was waiting for her, The Silverwork at Thistledown is about the patience of old courtesies, the long quiet kindness of friendships built across a kitchen table, the rhythm of a tide that comes in slowly and continues to come in, and the particular grace of being, for the first time, somewhere you are not afraid.