On This Day : A Novel

Synopsis from the paperback edition:

When their parents die within a year of each other, eighteen-year-old Warren and twenty-year-old Joan are left 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 from 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.

Click here to view the illustrations I created while writing the novel

Click here to buy On This Day

“Tenderhearted. Bellows has a warm sympathy for Warren and Joan’s new-found isolation and a clear–eyed respect for the power of the bond between them. Bellows succeeds in making their relationship deeply intimate…commendable.”
—The New York Times Book Review

"A quietly visionary novel about the world created by two orphans."
—The New York Times Book Review (2007)

“On This Day has the same buoyancy in the face of tragedy as Susan Minot’s classic Monkeys. On This Day is, in fact, a triumph.”
—The Los Angeles Times

“On This Day is a careful, sometimes disarmingly funny novel, capturing in its steadfast brother-sister bond the primitive attachment that Caron McCullers called ‘the we of me’…What is most memorable about the novel, though, is its structure. Seeking to deliver the blow-by-blow desolation of one traumatic year, On This Day telescopes a lifetime of family dynamics into crosscuts between past and present. Because of its stark lack of sentimentality, On This Day conveys the sometimes merciless reality of what Joan and Warren must endure—a loss that includes the bitter fact of their mother’s fondness for the bottle as well as sweeter memories of a childhood that seems long gone.”
—The Boston Globe

“An impressive debut novelist.”
—New York Magazine

“The sensibility that produced [On This Day] has a keen fix on human nature and the ways we seek to celebrate and preserve it.”
—Chicago Tribune

“Intimate…with equal parts dark humor [and] love.”
—Daily News (New York)

“Spare and finely wrought…piercing and unexpected.”
—Austin-American-Statesmen

“There is an honesty and a directness to this book that makes you…fall in love with its protagonists.”
—Elle Girl

“The teenage brother and twenty-year-old sister who appear in Nathaniel Bellows’s lovely debut novel, On This Day, have other things on their minds. Hovering between youth and adulthood, Joan and Warren must come to terms with their father’s death from cancer and their mother’s subsequent suicide in a small Maine town. While Joan tries to fulfill her role as the responsible elder child, Warren attempts to reconcile his overwhelming sense of loss with an instinct to keep living, as evidenced by his newfound feelings for a mysterious local woman. Despite the dark subject matter, Bellows’s characters are lively and likeable, their difficult path illuminated by unexpected humor and grace.”
—Vogue

“Poet Bellows brings a lyrical voice to his bittersweet first novel. When their parents die within the same year, siblings Warren and Joan attempt to forge new family unit. The death of their father from cancer and the subsequent suicide of their mother leave eighteen-year-old Warren and twenty-year-old Joan in a peculiar state of limbo. Too old to be traditional orphans but too young to be totally independent adults, they learn to rely on each other for both emotional and psychological support. Banding together to safeguard themselves against their father’s unscrupulous business partner and the unwelcome advances of an eccentric aunt and uncle, they undertake the difficult journey to healing and recovery. Underscoring their bitter past and less-than-idyllic family life—revealed in a series of flashbacks—is a pervasive sense of hope for their future. A stirring tale of loss and love from a promising new talent.”
—Booklist