The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel Audiobook

Quotes

• “The arresting prose, vividly original characters, and narrative drive…provided this reader with several hours of pure pleasure and a rare glimpse of grace in a fictional world.”

  — Anita Shreve, New York Times bestselling author of Testimony

• “A luminous debut.”

  — O, The Oprah Magazine

• “[A] moving family saga.”

  — Us Weekly

• “Smith’s spare, rhythmic prose captivates.”

  — New York Times

• “Finely wrought language blends startling details of the everyday with a dreamy, aphoristic quality. The effect is to root the novel in its historical moment but to reach toward the universal in its exploration of love and grief.”

  — Washington Post

• “Smith…has a real gift for describing both hope and despair…[and] drawing realistic, three-dimensional characters, particularly Tabitha and her grandfather Asa.”

  — NPR

• “[A] sweeping novel of familial love, faith, salvation, and loss through two generations. Many will find the complexity of relationships between child and parent fascinating, and the characters’ struggles to balance their emotions will resonate with readers. Here is a fiction debut that forces us to look into our hearts and think about our relationships.”

  — RT Book Reviews (4 stars)

• “Smith’s soulful language of loss is almost biblical, and the descriptions of her characters’ sorrows are poetic and moving.”

  — Publishers Weekly

• “Smith’s spare prose and storytelling style is resonant of oral history or folk tales, and the early chapters focusing on John and his daughter Tabitha and her desire for the sea call to mind Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife.”

  — Library Journal

• “Smith hasn’t merely evoked late-eighteenth century American lives on shore and at sea-she’s invented them afresh…She doesn’t peddle the cozy illusion that, after all, these were people just like us; while reading The Story of Land and Sea, we become just like them.”

  — David Gates, author of The Napoleonic Wars

• “A marvel. With prose as meticulous as brushstrokes, I can think of no other debut filled with such wonder, grace, and beauty…a tremendous achievement, a masterful exploration of parenthood and faith.”

  — Paul Yoon, author of Once the Shore

• “A pristine and powerful book…[Smith’s] voice is a poet’s and her vision is as expansive as the ocean, as the history in its depths. In her gorgeous and heart-rending first novel, she lays bare the hearts of parent and child, slave and master, and, most impressively, her readers.”

  — Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Remember Me like This