Following the publication of Ruin Creek, the Boston Globe wrote glowingly about David Payne, "Payne may not be the most publicized American novelist honing in on 40, but he is certainly the most gifted." His writing is so evocative of the region his characters inhabit that from the first page of Gravesand Light it is easy to be lost in the voices and ways of these people, their "hoi toide" accents and barnacle-encrusted pilings. In this, his fourth novel, two outsiders with conflicting political agendas come to live in an isolated fishing village on North Carolina's Outer Banks. With perfect pitch, Payne captures their uncertainty and joy as thy learn the villagers' distinctive social customs, fall passionately in love, and in a stirring climax, join in the desperate camaraderie of the town during a murderous winter storm.

Joe Madden is an intense young cultural anthropologist from Duke. He is conducting an ethnographic study on the lives of fisher folk, so he signs on to the boat Father's Price, and moves into his family's summer home on Little Roanoke. Soon after, he meets and begins an affair with Day Shaughenssy, the Yale-trained and fiercely feminist OB/GYN in residence at Beach Med. Payne writes with wonderful empathy about Day, creating a woman's voice and her inner conflicts with skill.

"The truth was, I'd never had the discipline in love that came to me so easily in work. It's not that I was weak; I only wanted to find someone to drink Italian roast with me on Sunday mornings and squeeze fresh juice and read the New York Times for, oh, the next forty years or so, someone I could tell the dream I'd had the night before, and shower with, and have fond, unthreatening sex in the middle of the afternoon when there were bills to pay or gardening to do..