There are a few reasons the novelist Kate Christensen, speaking via video chat from her home in Taos, N.M., is discussing the best lobster rolls in Maine.
The first is that the buttery sandwich figures in her new novel, her eighth, “Welcome Home, Stranger.” Rachel, a science journalist in Washington, D.C., has made a pilgrimage back to Portland, where her mother has died and left her a two-bedroom condominium. In the course of a plot woven out of multiple meals — pizza scarfed down while painting cabinets, “spring carrot and golden lentil” soup at a bougie restaurant, lard-fried corned beef and onions up in the North Woods — there is the moment Rachel convinces her ornery sister Celeste to drive to Two Lights State Park for a lobster roll worth the trip.
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