The Quiet Latitude—Mara Voss

A novel about distance—the kind you sail and the kind you keep. Available 24 September.

Marta Reyes has not spoken to her sister in eleven years when the boat arrives: a thirty-two-foot sloop, willed to them jointly by a father neither of them buried. The terms are simple and absurd—sail it together from Cadiz to the island where they were born, or sell it and split the silence for good.

The Quiet Latitude is a novel about the distances we navigate and the ones we refuse to. Over nineteen days at sea, two sisters discover that an ocean passage strips conversation of everywhere to hide: there is weather, there is watchkeeping, and eventually, unavoidably, there is the year everything went wrong.

The wind died a little after four, and with it went the last excuse not to talk. Marta watched the mainsail slacken and thought of all the rooms she had left rather than say the thing she was now going to have to say in the middle of an ocean, where the doors were four hundred miles apart.

An excerpt from chapter seven. The paragraph above stays ragged-right by design—verse and quotation keep their own shape—while running prose like this paragraph, and the long descriptions on the other slides, are set with full Knuth-Plass justification when JavaScript is available, and with the browser's native justification when it is not.

Mara Voss grew up between a boatyard and a lending library on the Atlantic coast, and has been trying to reconcile the two ever since. Her short fiction has appeared in small magazines and one glovebox anthology; The Quiet Latitude is her first novel. She lives inland now, which she regards as a temporary administrative error.

• "A sea story where the weather is the easy part."
• "Voss writes silence better than most writers write speech."
• "Nineteen days, two sisters, no exits—unputdownable."

From 24 September in paperback and ebook. Order from your local bookshop, or directly below.