The Far Blue

The bestselling author of The Dog Stars returns with a rich and lyrical novel of one man’s resilience against the ocean’s ferocious power as a husband finds himself swept out to sea off the coast of Maine.

“Get off the island. This is a bad one.” When Jordi Stohlquist’s phone rings in the pre-dawn hours, the ocean looks calm and glassy as a postcard. His cottage, a cabin perched above the sea, is stout as a lighthouse on a promontory, and Jordi finds it hard to believe that some bad weather could destroy what nearly two centuries of Nor’easters could not. Still, Jordi wakes his wife, Jin, and drives her and their big dog, Mancha, down to the ferry. He kisses her on the pier and assures her that he’ll be fine, and he returns to stormproof the cottage they bought a mere four months ago.

But as the swells begin to roll in—eight feet, now ten—whitecaps spuming off the tops, waves exploding against the rocks, a truck skids up to the cottage. In a shocking act of self-defense, Jordi is cast into the open ocean, and what follows, at sea, on a strange island, amid the wreckage of a ship, and deep in his own heart, is a wonderous story of a man bravely and desperately seeking home.