Critical Praise

“THE STORY OF LAND AND SEA is the best novel I have read all year. The writing is word-perfect with its nearly biblical cadences, its taut and relentlessly spare sentences, and its unusually wise utterances, all of which contribute to the sheer joy that comes from finding oneself in an imagined universe that feels as real as a splinter in a finger. I have a short shelf of books that I think of as my well, ones I go to often to remind myself what good writing is. On it are, among others, MARLETTE IN ECSTASY by Ron Hansen, CAL by Bernard Maclaverty, LIES OF SILENCE by Brian Moore, TRANSIT OF VENUS by Shirley Hazzard and the first chapter of ON CHESIL BEACH by Ian McEwan. THE STORY OF LAND AND SEA will join that shelf when published. The arresting prose, vividly original characters, and narrative drive with which Smith tells this story of desperate familial love on a long-ago coast provided this reader with several hours of pure pleasure and a rare glimpse of grace in a fictional world.”

—Anita Shreve

“THE STORY OF LAND AND SEA is a marvel. With prose as meticulous as brushstrokes, I can think of no other debut filled with such wonder, grace and beauty. It is a tremendous achievement, a masterful exploration of parenthood and faith, of fathers and daughters, and of a community struggling through the years in a newly born country. It is also an adventure story, with raging storms and ships, and a chronicle of the journeys we undertake for love, happiness and renewal. An heir apparent to Michael Ondaatje and Marilynne Robinson, Katy Simpson Smith has written a book for all of us.”

—Paul Yoon

“Katy Simpson Smith hasn’t merely evoked late-18th century American lives on shore and at sea --- she’s invented them afresh. These are stern, stoic, God-haunted people, with simple pleasures, soaring joys and searing sorrows, always intimate with the natural world, often foreigners to each other. Smith makes them convincingly strange, without a hint of anachronism: these are not 21st-century people in costume. 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

“THE STORY OF LAND AND SEA is a pristine and powerful book. Katy Smith has beautifully excavated a time and a place, and she’s plumbed the lives of characters we’ve yet to encounter in contemporary letters. Her 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

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

—Publishers Weekly

“A luminous Revolutionary War novel set to be the debut of the year.”

—Vogue

“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