The story of a young woman coming of age in the tumultuous Watergate years.

When Anna Berman leaves her boyfriend Sal and heads for the family cottage on an island off Cape Cod, she expects solitude and time to think. What she does not expect are uninvited house guests -- first Sal, then her teenage niece and a strange friend, and finally her father's girlfriend. Anna is drawn into a tumult of precarious relationships, both present and past, and is challenged by ambivalent feelings and shifting allegiances.

Born and raised in New York City, Cynthia Holz is also the author of three other novels, Onlyville, The Other Side and Semi-detached, and the other short story collection Home Again. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. She now lives in Toronto with her husband and son.

Cynthia Holz's profile page

'It is 1974, Richard Nixon is on the hot seat and Anna Berman is off to Onlyville. The island, cottage, summer home of her childhood and present-day refuge, it's ''a blank space, a hole in time, a place to enter and rest in.'' ... There in the cottage of her childhood, where the past seems to seep through the very floorboards, Anna squares off with her own history while the mess of big-h History -- Watergate -- unravels all about her ...'

Globe & Mail

'To anyone contemplating writing a novel about family, modern life and how social and political movements shape destinies: Read and cherish Onlyville. Book lovers, savor this handsomely produced book, illustrated with a dozen exquisite engravings by G. Brender ´ Brandis. And readers, be grateful for Cynthia Holz, who has the gift.'

The Ottawa Citizen

'In telling Anna's tale, Holz moves back and forth through layers of time, revealing her family's past, their mistakes and marriages over three decades. ... Onlyville is no lightweight beach novel. Holz's characters vibrate with ambiguities, their actions posing questions that will have no answer. ... Ultimately, Onlyville is a compassionate story of a woman's quest for understanding.'

The Toronto Star

'Onlyville opens in 1974 on the eastern seaboard of the United States against the background of the Watergate scandal and the pulsating pressure to impeach Richard Nixon. But all that is merely white noise for Anna Berman, who is floundering in her own turbid crisis. At 29, she has most of an undergraduate degree, a non-career as a temp, and an aging and overwhelming lover, Sal, a paranoid Korean War vet. In desperation Anna flees to her family's abandoned cottage in Onlyville. She dives into her past, hoping to emerge refreshed and unfettered by the ghost of her mother, who one day, years before, left Anna sitting on the beach, watching, while she swam away until she disappeared.'

Quill & Quire