Stranger from Across the Sea
by Regina McBride
“As soon as Violet O’Halloran arrived at St. Dymphna’s school and met the blind girl, Indira Sharma, I was captivated by this gorgeous and evocative novel. Regina McBride is a master of suspense and Stranger from Across the Sea is a deeply satisfying story.” —Margot Livesey, New York Times bestselling author of The Road to Belhaven
June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781963101010
About the Author
Stranger from Across the Sea is Regina McBride’s fifth novel. She is also the author of a book of poetry and, most recently, a memoir, Ghost Songs. Her novel, The Nature of Water and Air, was a Booksense pick (Independent Book Stores selection), a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers book, and a Borders Original Voices choice. It was optioned for a film. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, she lives in New York City where she teaches creative writing and fiction writing at Hunter College.
Description
As a teenager, Violet O’Halloran spent a summer at a Catholic boarding school in Northern Ireland, emptied of all other students but one: Indira Sharma, a blind girl from India with an extraordinary story. The beautiful but ultimately catastrophic friendship that formed between the two girls would go on to haunt Violet for years.
A decade later, Violet meets an Irishman, Emmett Fitzroy, at a party in New York City and is swept into an intense romance that brings her back to Ireland. While there, she unearths the stunning answers to mysteries left unresolved when Indira vanished from her life.
Set in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, Stranger from Across the Sea explores place, displacement, and exile and the ways in which the personal and the political are inseparable. At its heart, this is a story about a passionate friendship between two singular young women, one that transcends the limits of time and distance.
Reviews
“As soon as Violet O’Halloran arrived at St. Dymphna’s school and met the blind girl, Indira Sharma, I was captivated by this gorgeous and evocative novel. Regina McBride is a master of suspense and Stranger from Across the Sea is a deeply satisfying story.”
—Margot Livesey, New York Times bestselling author of The Road to Belhaven
“Regina McBride’s Stranger from Across the Sea is an intimate, multilayered narrative of lives disconnected and entwined, loves lost and remembered, secrets buried and resurrected, hopes shattered and redeemed. In richly nuanced prose, McBride weaves together the tragedy of history and the timeless yearnings of the human heart. Her artistry as a master storyteller has never been on better display. This is a book to read and reread. Its impact will stay with you long after the last page.”
— Peter Quinn, author of Cross Bronx: A Writing Life and Banished Children of Eve
“Stranger from Across the Sea is a tour de force. Captivating and enchanting, the book is a fierce and sensual story of mothers, daughters, friends, and lovers, set amidst generations of Irish struggles. Though the book is set on the rugged coastline of a small seaside village in Ireland, its stories come from as far as New York and India. Stranger from across the Sea is a magical book. Brava, Regina McBride.”
—Patty Dann, author of The Wright Sister and Mermaids
“I loved reading Regina McBride’s beautiful new novel, Stranger from Across the Sea. It’s a passionately written, highly lyrical story of the friendship between two girls, both dreamers, left by their too-busy mothers one summer in a remote convent on the lonely coast of Ireland. Although the story moves on in time, that friendship forms the basis for the remainder of the novel—a tapestry of love and sorrows, mysteries and secrets, memories and ghosts, betrayal and forgiveness, otherness and belonging—in the ‘salt and sorrow’ of Ireland. Read it, you’ll love it too.”
—Clarence Major, author of The Glint of Light and Golden Gate and other stories
“I was completely captivated by Stranger from Across The Sea. Violet is a sensitive guide through the many layers of this story, which is so well written I wasn’t in a hurry to uncover the secrets the house holds. Yet the layers of mystery were also compelling and fresh. This is the kind of book you begin again as soon as you finish.”
—Alice Elliott Dark, author of Fellowship Point and In the Gloaming
“A beautifully written book, filled with original details of place and time and drama that ring true, portraying all the mystery and complex emotion that come with being both familiar and a stranger. It will catch you up from the first page and hold you to the last.”
—Sheila Kohler, author of Open Secrets and Cracks
“With the opening of McBride’s transporting novel, we know we are in the hands of a poet and master storyteller. McBride beautifully captures the profound neediness hidden under the tempest of mothers and daughters, the delicate sensuality and haunting power of girls’ friendships, the vulnerability of adolescence, and the wish we all have to be found.”
—Lisa Gornick, author of Ana Turns
