Beyond That, the Sea

I’m so very thrilled that my debut novel, Beyond That, the Sea, is coming out in the UK on July 17th from Boundless Publishing Group. Because the novel takes place in Great Britain as well as America, I had always dreamed that it would be published in both places.

Over 25 years ago, I read an article in The New York Times about a group of British adults returning to the States to see where they had spent time during World War II when they were young. I was fascinated by this — I was aware that children in London were evacuated to the country, but I hadn’t known that children were sent so far afield and often traveled alone. My children were young when I learned about this, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the way this would feel to a child, and how this decision might impact the rest of their life. I was also interested in how this would feel to the adults and to the other children in the families, both those sending their child away and those bringing a strange child into their home. I then did some research, including reading See You After the Duration by Michael Henderson, a memoir by an evacuee who, coincidentally, had been sent to the same small town in Massachusetts where I went to high school. Suddenly the place came into focus for me, and my novel grew out of that.

The novel features Beatrix Thompson, an eleven-year-old girl whose parents, Millie and Reg, send her to America in the summer of 1940 to be safe. There, she settles in with the Gregorys and their two sons, William and Gerald. The novel follows both families for over thirty years, as their lives come together and move apart. I’m always interested in how fictional characters change over time. I like thinking about incremental change, about how characters slowly shift into a new way of being or understanding, and I also like to be immersed in a character’s life over a large swath of time. In this novel, the decision to send Beatrix away is the inciting incident but it is also the big thing that happens — the rest of the book essentially explores the aftermath of that decision. I kept thinking of it as a pebble thrown into a pond — the novel is formed by the circular ripples that develop from the impact, that move outward and diminish over time.

The novel was published in the US and Canada in March 2023 by Celadon Books, an imprint of Macmillan. It was an Indie Next Pick in April of 2023 and was also a Good Morning America Buzz Pick. In 2023, the book was on the Goodreads Longlist for both Best Debut Novel and Best Historical Fiction, and it was designated one of the top 20 debut novels by Amazon editors. The book has subsequently been published in ten other countries. In Germany, the book has sold over 20,000 copies and was nominated by independent booksellers as one of the top five favourite novels in 2024. To date, the novel has sold over 200,000 copies worldwide.