The Ocean Above Me

An American Legacy Book Awards Winner • A Hawthorne Prize Finalist

Longlisted for The Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize

""An intense and powerful novel about losing one’s way and then finding it again in the unlikeliest of places. I found it moving, thought-provoking and gripping in equal measure."" -- Ian McGuire, New York Times bestselling author of The North Water

Trapped undersea in a capsized shrimping trawler, a damaged former war correspondent is forced to confront a deadly secret from his past as he struggles to survive in this gripping novel of trauma, loss, love, and redemption from award-winning journalist and author of The Things They Cannot Say Kevin Sites.

Former war correspondent Lukas Landon is alone, trapped under 150-feet of water in an overturned shrimp trawler at the bottom of the ocean. The only thing keeping him alive is an air bubble in the ship’s bow. But the water level is rising, and time is running out. Landon doesn’t know if he will survive . . . or if he even deserves to.

After years of covering bloody battles in Afghanistan and Iraq, Landon’s once promising life took a steep nosedive. But he may have found a path to redemption: a series of in-depth stories on the Philomena, the rarest of South Carolina shrimp boats skippered by decorated former army sergeant Clarita Esteban.

A Black woman struggling to survive in a white man’s world, Clarita has assembled a crew of misfits as deeply wounded as herself; a Cuban first mate who came to America during the Mariel boatlift and his troubled younger cousin; a quiet Haitian cook with a secret black book; a deckhand, the only member of the ship’s former crew willing to work for a Black female skipper; and Clarita’s daughter, who lost a college basketball scholarship to an injury.

As Landon slowly earns the disparate crew’s trust, uncovering their pasts—and how each landed aboard this rusty bucket of bolts with its own shaded history—he keeps his own story and the events that unmoored the foundation of his life a secret. But when catastrophe strikes—leaving him twenty-fathoms deep in exquisite isolation—Landon has no one to question but himself. Will he finally come clean? And if he does, will he make it out alive from this 110-ton steel tomb under the sea to finally tell the truth to those who need to hear it?

A thrilling fight for survival and a poignant story of loss and redemption, The Ocean Above Me is a literary masterpiece that explores the effects of trauma, the pain of forgiveness, and the light of love that burns in the darkest depths.