In the eerie, dreamlike speculative love story Habits of the Sea by Shea Ernshaw (A History of Wild Places), a woman encounters a fabled floating island and the enigmatic, ageless man who lives there.
Ellie has built herself a stable, predictable adult life after a childhood characterized by upheaval. Her mother sent her for a temporary stay with her grandmother in Nova Scotia and never reclaimed her. At age 12, Ellie took her Nana's boat into a storm to investigate a terrible noise; she found the mythical floating island of Saltwell, a name evocative of tears, and spent one night on it. When she returned to the mainland, the adults didn't believe her about the island and told her she had been missing for a week. Now grown, Ellie works as a therapist in Seattle and has just received a marriage proposal from her handsome, reliable boyfriend, James. Everything is falling into place, but "when I close my eyes, I see the ocean," she says, and thinks her engagement ring "feels like a thorn pressing against the arch of my foot." Then Saltwell reappears near the Faroe Islands, and Ellie gives in to the impulse to go there and prove once and for all whether the island exists.
She finds the island just as she remembers it, complete with one lonely house inhabited by the solitary Scotsman Clay Lockhart, who hasn't aged a day since she last saw him two decades earlier. The island drifts back out to sea before Ellie can return to the mainland. She can only hope it will come ashore again quickly, because the discrepancy between island and mainland time means months on the island translates to years in the outside world. Then there's Clay, taciturn yet compelling, who rouses feelings in Ellie that James never could. She will have to make an almost impossible choice between a safe life and truly living.
Ernshaw's intimate gothic drama plays out against a rugged and dangerous yet beautiful setting as the characters encounter moments of transient paradise underscored by disaster. The drifting island itself seems like a physical manifestation of grief and isolation. Ellie and readers only glimpse the surrounding world in occasional vignettes that lend a sense of continuing deterioration around Saltwell, which becomes more haven than prison. This love story has grit, complexity, and a core of darkness under a patina of wildness and freedom. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads
Shelf Talker: A woman finds love and danger on an island adrift in time in this eerie, dreamlike speculative love story.