KEYNOTE

Trapped 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

FROM THE BACK COVER

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 nephew; a quiet Haitian cook with a secret black book; a deckhand from the ship’s former crew, the only man 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.

PRAISE FOR SWIMMING WITH WARLORDS, FROM AUTHOR/JOURNALIST KEVIN SITES:

“Kevin Sites is one of our national treasures—a fearless correspondent who has devoted himself to documenting not just the facts of war, but also its deepest emotional textures. Here is a thinking, feeling eyewitness to history who knows the perverse excitement of battle, but who questions every raw experience with plangent curiosity. Read Swimming With Warlords and you will never think of Afghanistan, or America’s ragged entanglements there, in the same way again.”
Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Soldiers and In the Kingdom of Ice

“…gripping and poignant.”
Kirkus Reviews

PRAISE FOR IN THE HOT ZONE

“…instead of telling us what we already know, he has done something remarkable, delivering the sort of fresh and insightful human stories from that conflict that we seldom hear. Sites is actually telling us something new.”
Columbia Journalism Review

PRAISE FOR THINGS THEY CANNOT SAY

“The book largely does what good books should: whisper secrets to the world.”
San Francisco Chronicle

“The Things They Cannot Say is a vivid set of portraits of modern combatants written with prose that moves with speed and heat.”
Edward Tick, Author, War and the Soul and Co-Director of A Soldier’s Heart

 “This powerful book captures a grim reality many soldiers face after combat.”
Business Insider

“Riveting and emotionally raw … These gripping stories … are evidence of a profound desire to heal.”
Publisher’s Weekly

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