The Story of Land and Sea

A heartrending debut of love and loss, set in 18th Century North Carolina, Katy Simpson Smith has already been acclaimed as an 'heir apparent to to Michael Ondaatje and Marilynne Robinson' On the coast of North Carolina in 1793, ten-year-old Tabitha contracts yellow fever. To save her life, her father John stows her away on a three-mast sloop bound for Bermuda. It's an act of desperation, and of instinct, too - this is not the first time he's taken to open water to guard a fragile love. Decades earlier, Tab's mother Helen receives Moll, a slave child, for her tenth birthday as a gift from her father, Asa. Both opinionated and stubborn, the girls grow up together forming an unlikely friendship between the tall pines of Asa's turpentine plantation. But when Helen meets and falls in love with John, their paths diverge, as the town is dramatically captured in the last days of the revolution. Set against the waning years of the Revolutionary War, THE STORY OF LAND AND SEA captures the singular love that binds parent to child, and the devastation of love lost.