New Books Look At 9/11 Victims, Life As A Hermit

 A non-fiction book about the fight to fund the Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund and a novel about a woman who escapes the world to become a garden hermit are new releases from local authors.

 The skies over Chatham on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, were a deep, cloudless blue.

 Looking back to that terrible day, people often remember the clear blue skies of Manhattan, John Feal writes in “I Will Follow You Anywhere: The True Story of the 9/11 Responders Who Took on Congress” (BenBella, 2026).

 But “as far as I’m concerned, Sept. 11 and the days that follow are dark,” Feal adds. Feal worked as a demolition supervisor at Ground Zero after the attack that destroyed New York’s Twin Towers. Many responders and even responders’ family members developed diseases ranging from cancer to early-onset dementia after breathing the toxin-laden dust in the air at Ground Zero. This book tells the story of the long fight to get the responders and cleanup workers, volunteers and survivors the government compensation they deserved. It also outlines a recipe for effective activism that can be adopted by others.

 Television host Jon Stewart, who testified before Congress in 2019 advocating for funding the federal Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund, wrote the book’s four-page forward. 

 The book has a strong Chatham connection as Feal’s co-author is Charles Daly, who grew up partly in Chatham. With his father, Charles U. Daly, Daly wrote “Make Peace or Die,” the elder Daly’s 2020 memoir of his combat years and life afterwards. The younger Daly is now a ghostwriter, developmental editor and book coach. He has co-authored several books on “difficult topics” with various authors.

 On 9/11, Daly was 11 years old and attending middle school outside of Boston. Because his family owned a farm in Ireland, “I had seen bombings on the news every summer in Ireland in the last days of the Troubles,” he recalled during an email interview last week. “But I couldn’t understand that it was happening here and at a scale that nobody could comprehend.”

 In the days after 9/11, Feal worked as a demolition supervisor at Ground Zero. Four days into the job, as part of a team removing an 8,000-pound chunk of steel off the pile of debris, the beam fell onto his foot. He ended up with a partial foot amputation and a pile of medical bills.

 The literary collaboration between Daly, who has now lived in Ireland for five years, and Feal began remotely. The pair spent over 100 hours on the phone and in Zoom meetings. They read and watched everything to do with 9/11, its aftermath and Feal’s activism. 

 “My interviews with other responders and survivors made it into the book as the oral histories at the beginning of each chapter,” Daly says. He traveled to New York City to meet with Feal, visit a firehouse and talk to the archivists at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.

 “This community of responders and survivors welcomed me into their lives and treated me like one of their own,” he says. About the book, he adds, “it’s a tough read in places, but it’s funnier than people might expect. The responders and survivors are not a glum crowd.”

 Signed copies of “I Will Follow You Anywhere” are now available at Yellow Umbrella Books in Chatham.

 The new novel by Susan Blood of Orleans, “Hermit” (Sea Crow Press, 2026), was born out of an Arts Foundation of Cape Cod Writing Fellowship which came with a dune shack residency. When Blood went to the dune shack for her week of solitude, she carried a printout of the novel in a binder and a blank spiral notebook.

 “There was not much to do but walk, watch the seals, and write, and it was wonderful to be pinned to the work in that way,” she says. “I just couldn’t believe there was an experience I could have that informed the story so perfectly. It was a game changer.”

 “Hermit” is about a woman named Holly who accepts a position as a garden hermit on a 200-acre historic estate somewhere in New England. The job description? “Look pensive.” The town is never named, but Blood drew her inspiration from several specific places such as the Soup Kitchen in Provincetown and, yes, the dune shacks. 

 “There was also an estate outside Boston, across the street from where my mom grew up,” she says. “It was gated, and you could see just enough to create your own picture of what was in there — which I did every time we visited our grandparents.”

 When Holly moves into the shack, she discovers it has a hand-made bed, a handpump for water and a pile of kindling outside the door. A bathroom is in a nearby carriage house. While things start out well for Holly, reality eventually intrudes on her quest for peace and enlightenment.

 While writing the book “the characters and environment became quite real to me,” Blood says, “and I felt like I was living two different realities.”

 Blood will read from “Hermit” on Wednesday, Sept. 16 at 6 p.m. during a book launch at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Also reading will be novelist Indira Ganesan and short story writer Peter Kazon. Blood will also read from her work at the Snow Library in Orleans on Friday, Oct. 2 at 2 p.m. along with novelist Candace Hammond and poet Kristin Knowles.