Description

This is the story of Jane and Kenji. It’s a story about love, and a story about disaster.

It’s summer on Hilo, and ambitious, driven Jane Yoon is home from college. Waiting tables one evening, she crosses paths with Kenji Lee, a boy from her childhood whose present and future are firmly rooted on their little island.

Over the summer, a spark ignites between this unlikely pairing. But when a tsunami hits the island, Jane and Kenji are plunged into grief, and torn apart. While Kenji knows he has to stay and rebuild their home, Jane flees – and doesn’t look back.

Seven years later, far from home, Jane and Kenji’s paths cross again – by chance, or by fate?

Everything to the Sea is a tale of regret and remembrance, home-building and homecoming, betrayal and forgiveness. And above all, it is a story about love: what it survives, and what it can rebuild.

Publisher Review

With all the force of a tidal wave and the tenderness of a romance, Everything to the Sea tells two equally powerful stories of an island community and two young lovers, whose fates are swept together by a tsunami. At once epic and human-scale, this novel places our lives, families, passions, and tragedies within a turbulent landscape. It is compassionate and merciless, beautiful and devastating, honest and ultimately hopeful. Alicia Upano has made an extraordinary debut -- JULIA PHILLIPS With equal parts wisdom and wit, Everything to the Sea tells about love as it's felt when frustrated or betrayed in the face of too many other needed and urgent things, and the many ways that one finds family in surprising, beautiful turns. Alicia Upano's striking debut will simultaneously quicken your pulse and force you to slow down, take a deep breath - this is a life-affirming, heartbreaking novel you won't want to miss -- JEAN CHEN HO Everything to the Sea is an epic and deeply moving love story, as much about how grief changes us as it is about how great love can do the same. In stunning and stylish prose, Alicia Upano follows the aftermath of tragedy - survival, recovery, and transformation - taking up the question of what we owe to the places and people we call home -- KRISTIANA KAHAKAUWILA