Lights on the Sea

“Miquel Reina’s Lights on the Sea is an absolutely lovely, beautiful debut novel with a dreamy, fable-like quality that will appeal to readers. Fans of Life of Pi will love this novel.” —Kristin Hannah, New York Times bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Great Alone

On the highest point of an island, in a house clinging to the edge of a cliff, live Mary Rose and Harold Grapes, a retired couple still mourning the death of their son thirty-five years before. Weighed down by decades of grief and memories, the Grapeses have never moved past the tragedy. Then, on the eve of eviction from the most beautiful and dangerously unstable perch in the area, they’re uprooted by a violent storm. The disbelieving Grapeses and their home take a free-fall slide into the white-capped sea and float away.

As the past that once moored them recedes and disappears, Mary Rose and Harold are delivered from decades of sorrow by the ebb and flow of the waves. Ahead of them, a light shimmers on the horizon, guiding them toward a revelatory and cathartic new engagement with life, and all its wonder.

Wildly imaginative, deeply poignant, and entirely unexpected, Lights on the Sea sweeps readers away on a journey of fate, acceptance, redemption, and survival against the most rewarding of odds.

Barcelona-born Miquel Reina defines himself as a dreamer and a fighter; from a young age, he was drawn to the creative life, studying design and cinema before building his reputation as a filmmaker and graphic artist. His work in advertising won him several awards, including the prestigious Bronze Sun at Spain’s Festival de San Sebastián in 2011, and in 2014, his music video “Dead in the Water” was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival. Reina has lived in Vancouver, Canada, since 2016, working for a video-production studio and dedicating his free time to his most gratifying passion: writing. Lights on the Sea is his first novel. Visit Miquel at www.miquelreina.com and www.lucesenelmar.com.

Catherine E. Nelson is a literary translator specializing in contemporary Spanish literature. Her short story translations have appeared in a variety of journals, including Indiana Review and InTranslation. AmazonCrossing published her full-length translation, A Love for Rebecca by Mayte Uceda (2015). Nelson is Professor of Spanish at Nebraska Wesleyan University, where she teaches language, literature, writing, and translation.