Harvard Book Store Virtual Event: Vanessa Veselka

presenting The Great Offshore Grounds: A Novel

Harvard Book Store’s virtual event series welcomes acclaimed novelist and essayist VANESSA VESELKA—author of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize–winning novel Zazen—for a discussion of her latest novel, The Great Offshore Grounds.

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About The Great Offshore Grounds

On the day of their estranged father’s wedding, half sisters Cheyenne and Livy set off to claim their inheritance. It’s been years since the two have seen each other. Cheyenne is newly back in Seattle, crashing with Livy after a failed marriage and a series of dead ends. Livy works refinishing boats, her resentment against her freeloading sister growing as she tamps down dreams of fishing off the coast of Alaska. But the promise of a shot at financial security brings the two together to claim what’s theirs. Except, instead of money, what their father gives them is information—a name—which both reveals a stunning family secret and compels them to come to grips with it. In the face of their new reality, the sisters and their adopted brother each set out on journeys that will test their faith in one another, as well as their definitions of freedom.

Moving from Seattle’s underground to the docks of the Far North, from the hideaways of the southern swamps to the storied reaches of the Great Offshore Grounds, Vanessa Veselka spins a tale with boundless verve, linguistic vitality, and undeniable tenderness.

Praise for The Great Offshore Grounds

“The Great Offshore Grounds reminded me of what a great novel can do—Veselka’s seafaring epic has the forward momentum of a grand adventure and the spiraling depth of a new myth. All the pleasure of eighteenth century storytelling renewed for our newborn millennium. I love this textured, tonally complex wonder of a book, a quest for Melville’s ‘unimaginable sublimity’ that never shies away from the messy flux of the body, or the oceanic scope of our shared global history. It’s also a blast to read—darkly hilarious, astral, cerebral, suspenseful, warm-blooded, divine.” —Karen Russell, author of Orange World

“I immediately fell in love with the phenomenal sisters at the heart of Vanessa Veselka’s supernova of a new novel, The Great Offshore Grounds. This novel is thrilling in its content, daring in heart, and makes a helix between a novel of ideas and the best damn story of women who forge their identities on their own terms that I’ve read in years.” —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Verge

“The Great Offshore Grounds blew me away. The tangled journeys of three siblings in the hardest of times pursuing freedom and love through a broken world will both move and dazzle readers. Wry, epic, glorious.” —Emma Donoghue, author of Akin