The Seaboard Parish

A portrait of a minister and his family. Second in the Scottish author’s Marshmallows Trilogy following Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood.

The publication in 1868 of this sequel to Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood capped off one of George MacDonald’s most productive years with a third major fiction work following Robert Falconer and Guild Court. Set in the Cornwall seaside town of Bude and inspired by a MacDonald family holiday a few years earlier, this novel continues the leisurely pastoral pace of minister Harry Walton’s family. Like Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood, it was first written for “Sabbath reading” in the Sunday Magazine. Almost taking the form of a “family diary,” A Seaboard Parish is yet rich with spiritual insight and wisdom.