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Two If by Sea: A Novel by [Jacquelyn Mitchard]

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Jacquelyn Mitchard

Two If by Sea: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Jacquelyn Mitchard (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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From Jacquelyn Mitchard, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Deep End of the Ocean, the “suspenseful, otherwordly, and nearly impossible to put down” (People) story about an unlikely hero whose life is transformed when he rescues a boy with an extraordinary gift.

Just hours after his wife and her entire family perish in the Christmas Eve tsunami, former police officer Frank Mercy pulls a little boy from a submerged car. Not quite knowing why, Frank doesn’t turn Ian over to the Red Cross. Instead he makes up a story about where the boy came from and takes him home, where Frank realizes that Ian has an otherworldly gift—an extraordinary ability to transform lives beyond anything he’d ever imagined. Awed and confused, Frank confesses Ian’s secret to Claudia, a beautiful champion rider who is training for the Olympics. They join together to fight the sinister forces gathering to take Ian back. In a final confrontation, Frank and Claudia will risk everything—their love, their family, their very lives—to save this boy they now love as their own son.

Print length

417 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Simon & Schuster
Publication date

15 March 2016
File size

3530 KB
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Review

“Suspenseful, otherworldly and nearly impossible to put down.” ― People

"Mitchard's latest novel explores the fascinating question of those who have extraordinary gifts, what responsibility comes with those gifts, and where the line of morality falls between those poles. A thoughtful, sweeping read." -- Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of Leaving Time

"Soulful and emotionally arresting, Two If by Sea is somehow both a startling departure for Jacquelyn Mitchard and the deepest sort of coming home. With the intertwining fates of Frank Mercy and the mysterious, exceptional foundling, Ian, Mitchard masterfully mines the place where catastrophic loss meets near-impossible hope and healing, and where ordinary love and sorrow meet the most extraordinary interventions. This book will open your mind and heart in equal measures." -- Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife

"A day after losing his wife and unborn child in a tsunami in Australia, American Frank Mercy rescues a mysterious young boy from the floodwaters. What happens next offers Mercy the opportunity to heal his new wounds while opening old ones. This sprawling family saga is a lot of things - a finely drawn character study, a transcontinental thriller, a portrait of grief and loss - but, most importantly, it is a very, very good book. Although it brings to mind the work of writers like Gail Godwin and Richard Flanagan, this is the kind of novel that only Jacquelyn Mitchard can write: a literary page-turner that is as propulsive as it resonant, as hard to define as it is to put down." -- Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home and This Dark Road to Mercy

"Jacquelyn Mitchard has done it again. TWO IF BY SEA is a riveting story of loss, love, and redemption, driven by the tension between the worst of us and the best of us. Both supernatural and reality-bound, this tantalizing thriller won’t let you go. Kudos to Mitchard for such an insightful and compelling read.” -- B.A. Shapiro, author of The Art Forger

"With grand landscapes, deep emotions, harrowing adventure, and genuine characters who aren¹t characters at all but people about whom we come to care so very much, Two if by Sea is a powerful blockbuster of the first order. There is magic here, both in terms of the vast story told, and in Ms. Mitchard¹s always-beautiful writing. This is a riveting book, a gift to readers everywhere who want to sink into a novel of history and love and grace and magic." -- Brett Lott, author of Jewel

“A gripping family saga buoyed by hope and second chances…Racing to its conclusion, Mitchard's sweeping prose suspends natural boundaries. She forges a fresh sense of faith despite incredible odds.” ― Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Bestselling author Jacquelyn Mitchard (The Deep End of the Ocean) balances love and loss in her new novel, Two If By Sea. It is a sweet story of one man’s road to recovery and the challenges he faces to protect the people he loves…It’s a universal adventure full of emotion and quite a bit of intrigue.” ― Fort Worth Star-Telegram

"A troubled protagonist, beset by disaster and malefaction, is touched by magic.” ― Kirkus Reviews

“A gripping new family drama… Mitchard deftly weaves together domestic drama with taut suspense as she builds to a heart-stopping climax…Mitchard explores new territory in this unusual and suspenseful tale.” ― Booklist

"Mitchard’s latest combines elements of science fiction and suspense with a heartfelt meditation on family and grief. … Mitchard’s usual strong characters and emotionally resonant prose are evident.” ― Publishers Weekly --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

About the Author

New York Times bestselling author Jacquelyn Mitchard has written many novels for adults, including Two If by Sea. She has also written young adult novels; children’s books; a memoir, Mother Less Child; and a collection of essays, The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship. Her first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, was the inaugural selection of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club, later adapted for a feature film starring and produced by Michelle Pfeiffer. Mitchard is the editor in chief and co-creator of Merit Press and a professor of fiction and creative nonfiction at Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier. She lives on Cape Cod with her husband and their nine children. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Two If by Sea

ONE

SO MANY THINGS happen when people can’t sleep.

It was always hot in Brisbane, but that night was pouty, unsettling. After getting Natalie and her family comfortable in their rooms at the inn, Frank couldn’t rest. His leg plagued him. The toll of oppressive weather on that kind of old injury was no old farmer’s myth. He rambled around, briefly joining Natalie’s brother Brian in the bar on the beach, then painfully mounting the switchbacked decks of wooden stairs that led to a kind of viewing platform just adjacent to the car park, looking out over Bribie Island Beach. Up there, he hoped the signal would be good enough to call home, his home, if home is the place you started. For Frank, that would always be a ramshackle horse farm in south-central Wisconsin—now probably more ramshackle than when he last saw it, three years before. As the brrrrr on the other end began, his pulse quickened. He looked up at the sky and thought of all the calls darting through the sea of radio waves tonight, swift as swallows—dutiful, hopeful, wistful, sad.

“Frank?” His sister, Eden, answered, her voice holiday-bright and holiday-brittle, suddenly next to him across nine thousand miles. He was about to ask her to summon his mother to the phone so they could all talk together when he saw it. Without thinking, and without another word to Edie, he let his phone slip into his jeans pocket.

He could not figure out what it was.

He would never remember it as a wave.

Wave was too mere a word.

Although there were hundreds of photos and pieces of film, some shot just at the moment, near this very spot, Frank could look at these and remain curiously unmoved. But should he close his eyes and let himself return, the sick sweats would sweep down his breastbone, a sluice of molten ice. He would hear again the single dog’s one mournful howl, and feel the heavy apprehension, something like that moment from his days as a uniform cop when a routine traffic stop went completely to shit and a fist came flying in from nowhere, but monumentally worse. So much worse that it routed even imagination. Many years later, Frank would think, this was his first sight of the thing that would sweep away the center of his life in the minutes after midnight, and, by the time the sun rose, send surging into his arms the seed of his life to come.

Just like that. Like some mythical deity with blind eyes that took and gave unquestioned.

He saw the wave as a gleaming dam, built of stainless steel, standing upright in the misty moonlight, fifty feet tall and extending for half a mile in either direction. Then, as it collapsed in place, it was water, surging lustily forward and drowning every building on the beach, including the Murry Sand Castle Inn, where Frank’s pregnant wife and her entire extended family lay asleep. For one breath, Frank saw the inn, its porch strung with merry lanterns, red and gold and green, and in the next breath, he saw everything disappear, every light go out, faster than it was possible to think the words that could describe it.

He shouted, “No!” and stumbled forward to make his way down the high tiers of wooden stairs he had only just ascended.

Hoarse, in the distance, another voice called, “No!” over a cascade of sound—the brittle pop of breaking glass, screams peppering the air like gunshot, and the throaty insistence of the water.

Even as Frank turned, the mud-colored tide was boiling up the stairs and leaping the boardwalk barricade. He plunged forward, trying to wade against it, to find the riser of the wooden steps, but there was nothing; his foot bounced against water; he was soaked to the thigh. Pulling himself up along the top rail of the fence, for he would certainly be able to see something of the inn from there, or at least hear something, he shouted, “Natalie!” There were no voices. No lights except the milky smear from the hotels and office towers far in the distance to his left, like a frill of fallen stars. No sound except the insistent gossip of the water, and he was wet now to his waist. Grateful that he was still at least relatively young and passably fit, Frank hauled himself over the fence. He skip-sprinted across the car park, to their little Morris Mini-Minor. Water was already frothing around the tires. Frank pulled open the door, throwing himself into the seat, fumbling for his keys, quickly gaining the highway.

He stopped again and got out.

He heard a man’s voice cry, “Help! Who’s there . . . ?” and then again the swallowing silence. Floodwater rocked at the verge of the road; now how many feet above sea level? Of the two of them, Natalie was, pound for pound, by far the stronger, fitter, even tougher. Of the two of them, she was also the more intrepid, the more likely to have found some way to outsmart and elude this cliff of tides. They would find each other, and he did her no service by stalling here, forsaking his own life for no purpose. Natalie would have hated him for that. He floored it, racing inland. Miles sloughed away and he felt rather than saw the dark shapes of other cars congealing around him.

At last, there was nowhere to move, and all the cars had to stop and Frank got out and walked.

Others walked, too.

An old man struggled under the weight of a gray-lipped girl. She was perhaps ten or eleven years old and her sweet, lifeless face had closed in a smile, her nose and eyes pouring saltwater tears. Frank saw a young woman wearing just one shoe. She clutched a bundle of wet clothes, among them a child’s small jersey embroidered with cross-stitched Santas. A man Frank’s own age sat sobbing near a great blooming evergreen frangipani. Frank avoided their eyes. He thought he might be able to get to a place where he could think, but he only walked farther. He met people hiking toward him, or saw them sitting in their cars, or standing still by the roadside, their hands like the pendulums of broken clocks. After some time, he came upon a large group gathered around a car whose young driver had removed his outsized speakers from the dash. A basso radio voice intoned, “Now you will hear that the tsunami happened because of climate change, friends. You will hear that it struck our coast because of a tropical storm deep in the Pacific. You will hear that this was a random event. But do you believe that? How can any man believe that it was coincidence that water swept into the Sodom of Brisbane on this very hallowed night? Intelligent people will say that we have failed to take care of our earth. But the Lord God Almighty does not care about the climate. He cares about the climate of our souls! As it says in Matthew, ‘Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.’ And so it has come . . .”

Frank walked around a curve in the road, and the preacher’s voice faded to a series of thumps, like the bass notes of a song from a car passing the open window of Frank’s childhood bedroom on the farm. A pale vein of light lolled on the horizon.

It would soon be dawn, on Christmas morning. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B010MH1I9C
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition (15 March 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3530 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 417 pages

Best Sellers Rank: 476,104 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 9,709 in Literary Fiction (Kindle Store)
- 10,974 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- 11,524 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction

Customer Reviews:
228 ratings

About the author

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Jacquelyn Mitchard

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Jacquelyn Mitchard was born in Chicago. Her first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, was published in 1996, becoming the first selection of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club and a number one New York Times bestseller. Nine other novels, four children's books and six young adult novels followed, including Two if By Sea, No Time to Wave Goodbye, Still Summer, All We Know of Heaven, and The Breakdown Lane. Mitchard's writing has won or been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award, the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, UK's Talkabout Prize, and the Bram Stoker Award. A former daily newspaper reporter, Mitchard is a professor in the Master of Fine Arts program at Miami University of Ohio. She frequently writes for such publications as Glamour, O the Oprah Winfrey Magazine, Marie Claire, and Readers Digest. Her essays and short stories have been widely anthologized. She lives on Cape Cod with her family.

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Richiedog

This is one of the best books I've read so far

Reviewed in Canada on 19 April 2016

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This is one of the best books I've read so far. Please, read this book! I've read many great books, this is easily in the top five.

Joy Clarke

I found this book a little slow and I lost ...

Reviewed in Canada on 3 May 2016

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I found this book a little slow and I lost interest in it about half way through. I did go back and finish it after I had read another book.

Jan Tuffnail

Four Stars

Reviewed in Canada on 8 October 2016

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Twists and turns in this book and surprises throughout!

Wendy Haines

Three Stars

Reviewed in Canada on 21 May 2016

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It was hard to get into the book

Jilla Lonsdale

What happened with this book JM?

Reviewed in Canada on 28 March 2016

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Horribly written, Jacquelyn Mitchard takes an amazing premise and completely mucks it up -- this book is a train wreck -- like the author actually got to publish her SFD (sh$&@tty first draft) with no editor for 100 miles. The writing is jerky and skittles back and forth and the narrative never takes shape -- we end the book with no idea of why the villian actually does what he does. A totally unsatisfying story and not worthy of a writer of her caliber -- save the time and money and give this one a pass

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Two If by Sea: A Novel Kindle Edition

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