Two If By Sea
Just hours after his wife and her entire family perish in the Christmas Eve tsunami in Brisbane, American expat and former police officer Frank Mercy goes out to join his volunteer rescue unit. While on patrol, he pulls a little boy from a submerged car, saving the child’s life with only seconds to spare. In that moment, Frank’s own life is transformed. Not quite knowing why, Frank sidesteps the law, when, instead of turning Ian over to the Red Cross, he takes the boy home to the Midwestern farm where he grew up. Not long into their journey, Frank begins to believe that Ian has an extraordinary, impossible telepathic gift, and his only wish is to protect the deeply frightened child. As Frank struggles to start over, training horses as his father and grandfather did before him, he meets Claudia, a champion equestrian and someone with whom he can share his life—and his fears for Ian.
Both know that it will be impossible to keep Ian’s gift a secret forever. Already, ominous coincidences have put Frank’s police instincts on high alert, as strangers trespass the quiet life at the family farm. The fight to keep Ian safe from a powerfully sinister antagonist takes readers from the ravaged shores of Brisbane to the middle of America to a quaint English village. Even as Frank and Claudia dare to hope for new love, it becomes clear that they can never let Ian go, no matter the cost. A suspenseful novel on a grand scale, Two If By Sea is about the best and worst in people, and the possibility of heroism—and even magic—in ordinary life.
Jacquelyn Mitchard
Jacquelyn Mitchard has written ten novels for adults, including several New York Times bestsellers and several that have enjoyed critical acclaim and awards including Great Britain’s Talkabout prize and the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction long list. She has also written seven Young Adult novels; five children’s books; a memoir, Mother Less Child; and a collection of essays, The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship. Her essays have been published in newspapers and magazines worldwide, widely anthologized, and incorporated into school curricula. Her reportage on educational issues facing American Indian children won the Hampton and Maggie Awards for Public Service Journalism. Mitchard’s work as part of Shadow Show, the anthology of short stories honoring her mentor, Ray Bradbury, won the Bram Stoker Award and Shirley Jackson Award, and was short-listed for the Audie Award.
She served on the Fiction jury for the 2003 National Book Awards, and 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, a realistic YA Fiction imprint. She is a Distinguished Fellow at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois; a DeWitt Wallace Readers Digest Fellow at the MacDowell Colony in Peterboro, NH; and a professor of Fiction and Creative non-fiction at Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier VT. She lives on Cape Cod with her husband and their nine children, who range in age from nine to 29.