Sumptuous and richly layered, this novel is drowning in the pains and pleasures humanity.
This event took place on Wednesday, July 28 for this Climate Reads conversation with three celebrated authors: Elizabeth Rush, Matt Bell, and Carolina De Robertis.
Missed the live event? Watch the video.
The Veins of the Ocean
The Veins of the Ocean is the profound and riveting story of a young woman’s journey away from her family’s painful past towards redemption and a freer future. Reina Castillo’s beloved brother is serving a death sentence for a crime that shocked the community—a crime for which Reina secretly blames herself. When she is at last released from her seven-year prison vigil, Reina moves to a sleepy town in the Florida Keys seeking anonymity, and meets Nesto, a recently exiled Cuban awaiting the arrival of the children he left behind in Havana. Through Nesto’s love of the sea and capacity for faith, Reina comes to understand her own connections to the life-giving and destructive forces of the ocean that surrounds her, as well as its role in her family’s troubled history and their crossing of the Caribbean to make the United States their home.
Set in the vibrant coastal communities of Miami, the Florida Keys, Havana, Cuba, and Cartagena, Colombia, The Veins of the Ocean is a wrenching exploration of what happens when life tests the limits of compassion, and a stunning and unforgettable portrait of fractured lives finding solace in the beauty and power of the natural world, and in one another.
Praise for The Veins of the Ocean
A New York Times Editors’ Choice
a finalist for the International Latino Book Award
A SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
“ENGEL’S WORK IS OFTEN BACKDROPPED BY DIASPORA, BUT IN THE VEINS OF THE OCEAN SHE TACKLES IMMIGRATION HEAD ON VIA THE STORY OF A COLOMBIAN WOMAN ESCAPING HER FAMILY’S PAST.” — O, The Oprah Magazine, “Writers on the Rise”
“Lush and entrancing, steeped in love and sorrow, faith and myth. . . Patricia Engel is a gorgeous writer and I love the confidence of her prose. She knows the story she is telling, inside and out. She knows the story and its unfathomable depths and so that’s how we experience reading this novel—fully, deeply, like an ocean.” —Roxane Gay for Book of the Month Club
Elizabeth Rush is the author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, and Still Lifes from a Vanishing City: Essays and Photographs from Yangon, Myanmar. Her work explores how humans adapt to changes enacted upon them by forces seemingly beyond their control, from ecological transformation to political revolution. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Harpers, Granta, Creative Nonfiction, Orion, Guernica and others. Rush is the recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, National Geographic, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Howard Foundation, Oregon State University’s Spring Creek Project, the Society for Environmental Journalism, the National Society of Science Writers and the Metcalf Institute. She teaches at Brown University and is currently at work on a book about motherhood and Antarctica’s diminishing glaciers.
Matt Bell ‘s latest novel, Appleseed, was published by Custom House in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, and revision, will follow in early 2022 from Soho Press.
He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, Orion, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
His novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award and an Indies Choice Adult Book of the Year Honor Recipient, and was selected as the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award, among other honors. Both In the House and Scrapper were selected by the Library of Michigan as Michigan Notable Books.
Carolina De Robertis a writer of Uruguayan origins, Carolina De Robertis is the author of the novels The President and the Frog, forthcoming in August 2021; Cantoras, winner of a Stonewall Book Award and a Reading Women Award, a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and a Lambda Literary Award, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice; The Gods of Tango, winner of a Stonewall Book Award; Perla; and the international bestseller The Invisible Mountain, which received Italy’s Rhegium Julii Prize. Her books have been translated into seventeen languages and have received numerous other honors, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
De Robertis is also an award-winning translator of Latin American and Spanish literature, and editor of the anthology Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times. In 2017, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts named De Robertis on its 100 List of “people, organizations, and movements that are shaping the future of culture.” She teaches at San Francisco State University, and lives in Oakland, California, with her wife and two children.
Patricia Engel is the author of 2021’s Infinite Country, a New York Times Bestseller, Reese’s Book Club pick, Esquire Book Club and Book of the Month Club pick, Indie Next pick, Amazon Best Book of the Month, and more. Her other books include The Veins of the Ocean, It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris, and of Vida, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Fiction Award and the Young Lions Fiction Award.
She has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, and Key West Literary Seminar among others, and is the recipient of an O. Henry Award.
Born to Colombian parents, Patricia is a graduate of New York University and earned her MFA at Florida International University. She currently teaches at the University of Miami. From patriciaengel.com.
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