Peaks Island writer explores the human consequences of immigration policy

Eleanor Morse’s latest book, This Foreign Land, has opened a quiet but powerful window into the human side of U.S. immigration policy. The novel, set in the rural outskirts of Augusta, follows a handful of characters as they walk toward the southern border, their paths overlapping in unexpected ways.

Morse, a long‑time resident of Maine, has said that the story sprang from the shock she felt at the headlines about children being separated from their parents at the border. “I used that shock to jumpstart my fifth novel,” she told the Press Herald. “It was a way to grapple with the policy in a more personal way.”

At the center of the book is Vincent Ottley, a young man who lives just outside of Augusta. When a 2018 radio broadcast about family separations reaches his ears, he asks his sister Bryn, “What are we? Savages?” The question sets him on a foot‑long trek south, secretly leaving the comfort of his home to try to help those on the other side of the border.

Vincent is a complex, compassionate character. Morse drew from her own family when creating him: “My father had a brother, Uncle Dwight, who had schizophrenia,” she explained. “I got to know him fairly well. I think Vincent partly grew from Uncle Dwight.” She has described Vincent’s bouts of psychosis as “askew and true,” a perspective she says she was comfortable slipping into during the writing process. In the latter stages of Uncle Dwight’s life, Morse served as his guardian—an experience that informed Vincent’s own struggles with mental health.

Bryn, Vincent’s sister, takes on the dual responsibility of caring for his beloved donkeys, managing a fragile third‑grade class, and dealing with her own faltering sense of self. In the novel, she develops an unlikely friendship with an arborist named Ollie Dobson. “Oddly enough, sometimes it’s easier for me to develop a male character than a female character,” Morse mused. “Ollie is a very different woman than I am, but I knew her name right away. She does something I don’t—climb trees, risk her life every day.” The relationship between Bryn and Ollie provides a grounding, quieter thread amid the novel’s more dramatic scenes.

One of the most memorable moments in the book occurs when Vincent stumbles upon a woman living in a tarpaper shack. She offers him a place to stay for the night, and he, in turn, offers to bury her husband’s ashes. “I had an image of an old piano that had music in it still, but nobody had played it in years and years,” Morse recalls. “In a sense, that’s who the woman was. She had music in her and she hadn’t really spoken much in years.” She says that scene was not pre‑planned; it emerged from the “thread” of the narrative as she was writing.

Morse’s research extended far beyond character sketches. She studied donkeys extensively—how they eat, how to trim their hooves, and their general care. “What they eat, how to trim their hooves, that kind of thing,” she said. She also delved into topics such as lightning strikes and schizophrenia, topics that were already familiar to her from her family life but required deeper exploration for authenticity.

Perhaps the most immersive research Morse undertook was a trip to the southern border. “I went to Texas because I needed to know more than I knew,” she said. “I met people while I was in Texas who had come through the Darién Gap, which is the most dangerous migration route in the world.” She recalls a mother with three children who had lost everything except the clothes on their backs. “I learned so much from everybody that I spoke with,” Morse noted. “I feel if I hadn’t crossed the border and spoken to people who were kind enough to speak to me, that I would not have had the right to tell any part of Dolores’s story.”

Dolores, a young Ecuadorian widow, and her daughter form another narrative thread. Morse explained that she wrestled with representing someone of a different ethnicity: “I grappled with it and finally came to think, ‘What do we have an imagination for? What do we have compassion in our hearts for if not to try to understand human beings who grow up differently than ourselves?’”

The author has been careful to avoid turning the book into a polemic. “Moral outrage, when it’s on the page, gets tiresome very quickly,” she told the Press Herald. “I didn’t want to write that kind of book any more than I would want to read it.” Instead, Morse’s focus has been on the compassionate heart of her characters. “I felt it would be cruel to use parents and their children politically,” she said. “Vincent’s grief was not outrage; it was the human connection that made him set out.” She added, “He set out because his heart told him to, and that’s how I set out: because my heart told me to.”

This Foreign Land thus offers readers a quiet, thoughtful look at the realities of migration and the human connections that arise amid political turmoil. With characters shaped by family history, rigorous research, and a desire to spark compassion rather than outrage, Morse provides a novel that is as moving as it is enlightening. The book is available now in hard‑cover, paperback, and ebook formats, and it is already drawing interest from readers across Maine and beyond.