Books Set on Cape Cod & the Islands

Cape Cod: Once Around the Sun is a visual and informational feast for nature lovers. From winter's dormant woodlands and barren beaches to the whales and waterbirds of high summer, this book explores Cape Cod's animals and plants through a year of dormancy, rebirth, and migration. 

In more than 150 photographs with captions, field biologist Peter Trull describes the cape's intricate ecosystems and reveals how beautifully the successive seasons come together. 

Patricia MacLachlan has written a lyrical ode to writing, to poetry, and to the celebrated American poet, Mary Oliver. In this mesmerizing picture book, a little girl wants to write, and one summer day she joins the poet who lives nearby to explore a town on Cape Cod. Together, they look. Together, they touch. Together, they find words. All things in the natural world, the girl discovers, bring words to the poet. Can the girl find the words to write her own poetry, too?

This insider's tour of the dune shacks of Provincetown, Massachusetts, combines images and quotes to bring to life the world of these rustic yet beautiful structures scattered across the Cape Cod National Seashore. Photographer and Provincetown resident Jane Paradise has captured their essence and spirit over nearly a decade of artist residencies and visits in the shacks. 

Originally published in 1931, this is a brand new edition from American Mystery Classics!

Meet Asey Mayo, Cape Cod's answer to Sherlock Holmes. Settled down from his former life as a seafaring adventurer, Asey is a Jack-of-all-trades who uses his worldly knowledge, folksy wisdom, and plain common sense to solve the most puzzling crimes to strike the peninsula. And in this, his first case, Asey finds himself embroiled in a scandal that will push his deductive powers to their limits.

Cape Cod and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket are special places known for their distinctive flora, including pine-oak forests, sandplain grasslands, and sand dunes peppered with bearberry shrubs. Unfortunately, this unique sense of place is under threat. In recent decades, contemporary landscape practices have come to depend on environmentally stressful fertilizers and irrigation systems, replacing this sensitive ecoregion’s native flora with generic turfgrasses and popular commercial nursery trees and shrubs that could exist anywhere.

A riveting and poignant portrait of marriage--lauded by New York Times bestselling author Elin Hilderbrand as "gorgeous and heartbreaking"--that explores the long union of a middle-aged couple grappling with secrets, illness, and loyalty.

Whether you call Cape Cod a man-made island or describe it as a geographic peninsula connected to the mainland by bridges, there is one non-debatable fact. Cape Cod is surrounded by water on all four sides, jutting out prominently into the Atlantic Ocean. This characteristic accounts in large measure for its history, its economic development, its aesthetic beauty, and its maritime legacy.

Staff pick! New in paperback!

The Hazel Wood meets The Astonishing Color of After in this dreamy, atmospheric novel that follows sixteen-year-old Eli as she tries to remember what truly happened the night her mother disappeared off a frozen fjord in Norway under the Northern Lights.

Never whistle at the Northern Lights, the legend goes, or they'll sweep down from the sky and carry you away.

An intimate portrait of a legendary generation of artists, writers, activists, and dreamers who created a utopia on the shores of Cape Cod during the first half of the twentieth century.

Now in paperback! "A story of summer, secrets, love and lies: in the course of a singular day on Cape Cod, one woman must make a life-changing decision that has been brewing for decades. Set against the summer backwoods and beaches of Cape Cod, The Paper Palace unfolds over 24 hours and across 50 years, as decades of family legacy, love, lies, secrets, and one unspeakable childhood tragedy lead wife and mother Elle Bishop to the precipice of a life-changing decision"-