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.

Like the HarperCollins hardcover edition of On This Day (below), the Harmon Blunt Publishers edition includes a set of illustrated endpapers taken from the series of drawings I made while writing the book.

Below you'll find versions of the front (left) and back (right) endpapers--each is a composite of two drawings stitched together. For the sake of better viewing, I've reproduced them here with more contrast--they're ghosted in the book. In the VISUAL ARTS section of the site, there are more examples of the drawings, and an explanation of how/why I created them.

These endpapers appear -- along with a short article about the book -- in the March/April issue of Print magazine (page 16).

(Click on any of the book jackets to link to Amazon.com.)

The HarperCollins hardcover edition of the book (above left) features four of my original drawings, which are used as illustrated endpapers.

"Nan" is the first (1) story in the series and it was published in POST ROAD Magazine #14. Click the image below to link to the magazine where they've posted the entire story:

"Country House " is the third (3) Nan story and it's been recently published in Redivider Magazine 5.2. Click the image below to link to the magazine.

"Forgiveness " is the fifth (5) Nan story and it's been recently published in the February 2009 issue of GUERNICA. Click the image below to link to the magazine where they've posted the entire story.

The Best American Short Stories 2005, edited by Michael Chabon, (Hougthton Mifflin 2005), includes my story, "First Four Measures," which originally appeared in Issue #170 of The Paris Review.