Sea of GlassIsobel Marchand Preorder
A novel · Fathom House · April 14, 2027

The sea gives everything back. Eventually.

Sixty-six years after the bottle works closed, the beach at Gull Ledge is still giving up its glass. The second novel from Isobel Marchand, author of Winter Harbour, is about what a family throws away, and what the tide brings home.

Preorder the hardcover Read the first page
  1. 01 · The cover

    Abyss-blue cloth over boards, stamped in 23-carat gold foil. Thirteen pieces of glass on the front, and one of them is red.

  2. 02 · The edges

    The first 5,000 copies are sprayed sea-glass green by hand at a bindery in Truro. No two come out quite the same.

  3. 03 · The endpapers

    Inside the cover, the 1957 survey chart of Gull Ledge, redrawn with the bottle works still standing.

  4. 04 · Page three

    Chapter one begins at low water. Read it as the light comes in, then keep going below.

Excerpt · Chapter one, from page three

Low Water

The bottle works at Gull Ledge closed in the spring of 1958, and the sea has been giving the glass back ever since. Agnes Fougère walks the beach below the old furnace at every low tide with a coffee tin under her arm, and she can date a piece by its color alone: cobalt from the medicine years, lavender from before the first war, brown from every bottle her father ever emptied off the end of the wharf. She has never kept a red one. Red is the rarest, one piece in ten thousand, and on the morning her granddaughter came home, Agnes was holding one.

It was the size of a thumbnail and warm, as if somebody had only just let go of it.

She did not hear the taxi. She heard the sea, which at Gull Ledge sounds less like water than like someone sweeping a floor of broken plates, and under it the small dry click of glass turning over glass. She heard a gull complain about the weather. Then she heard her own name said the way only one person had ever said it, with the second syllable dropped, and she closed her hand.

“Gran.”

Hollis stood at the top of the shingle with a suitcase that had been built for airports. She was twenty-six. The last time Agnes had seen her she had been eleven and furious, somebody had cut her hair badly, and she had refused to say goodbye to the dog.

Nobody calls at low water but the dead and the power company.

“You didn’t answer the phone,” Hollis said.

“I don’t answer it at low water.” Agnes started up the beach. The stones moved under her boots the way they always did, as if the whole shore were deciding whether to let her go. “Nobody calls at low water but the dead and the power company.”

Hollis did not laugh. Up close she had her grandfather’s eyes, which was unfair, and an envelope in her hand that had gone soft at the corners from being carried a long way.

“Mom found this in the wall,” she said. “When they took the old kitchen out. It has your name on it. It was never posted.”

Agnes looked at the envelope, and then at the sea, and then, because she could not help it, at the stone in her fist, which was still warm, and which she understood now she had been waiting forty years to be handed.

End of the excerpt. The novel continues for 378 pages.

Get all of chapter one by email

Early praise

Every sentence has been turned over in the surf until it is smooth enough to hold.

Owen Dacre, Quill & Tide Review

A novel as patient and as merciless as the tide. I finished it at two in the morning and could still hear the sea at breakfast.
Tamsin Vane, author of The Salt Archive
Marchand writes the Atlantic like a difficult relative: generous, unforgiving and impossible to leave.
The Halifax Ledger
The best novel about a family I have read in years, and the best about a place in much longer.
Rosalind Fyfe, author of Winter Lettering
Luminous and funny, and so precise about grief that I had to put it down twice and go for a walk.
Northshore Review, starred review
11

Rights sold in eleven territories before publication.United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Poland, Brazil, Japan and Korea, with translations arriving through 2028.

About the author

Isobel Marchand

Isobel grew up above her grandfather’s ship chandlery in Lunenburg and now lives in the North End of Halifax, ten minutes’ walk from the container piers.

Her first novel, Winter Harbour, won the Ledgewater Prize for Fiction and has been translated into nine languages. She teaches a night class in fiction at the public library on Spring Garden Road, and for nineteen years she has walked the same mile of the Eastern Shore every Sunday, low tide permitting.

She began Sea of Glass the morning she found her first and only red piece. It took her six years. The piece is on the cover.

Born
Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, 1979
Lives
Halifax’s North End, with a retired greyhound called Admiral
First novel
Winter Harbour, 2019
Her beach
One mile of the Eastern Shore, every Sunday since 2007
Writes
Longhand, mornings, at a kitchen table that used to be a door

Nineteen years, one beach, 3,412 pieces.

Everything Isobel has found is in a cherry map drawer in her kitchen, sorted by color. She lent us the inventory.

  • White1,486CommonWindow panes, milk bottles, medicine vials
  • Brown1,018CommonBeer and bleach bottles
  • Kelly green524CommonGinger ale and soda bottles
  • Seafoam211UncommonSoda bottles and canning jars, before 1960
  • Soft blue87UncommonMineral water and ink bottles
  • Olive41UncommonWine and gin bottles
  • Cobalt29RareMedicine bottles and cold-cream jars
  • Lavender11RareClear glass made before 1915, turned purple by the sun
  • Black4Very rareHand-blown rum bottles that glow olive against the light
  • Red1One in ten thousandA ship’s lantern, probably. Found June 2, 2019.
Readings & events · Spring 2027

Come down to the water.

  1. 14Apr · TueHalifaxNova ScotiaLaunch night at the Seaport CooperageReading, signing and a fiddle set from Ruthie Gillis · 7 pmFree · RSVP
  2. 16Apr · ThuLunenburgNova ScotiaThe Chandlery RoomIn conversation with Tamsin Vane · 7:30 pm$15 with a drink
  3. 18Apr · SatWolfvilleNova ScotiaOrchard Lane BooksReading and signing · 2 pmFree
  4. 22Apr · WedCharlottetownPrince Edward IslandQueen Street Library HallReading and audience questions · 7 pmFree · RSVP
  5. 27Apr · MonMontréalQuébecLe Comptoir des LettresA bilingual reading with translator Élodie Fortin · 7 pm$10
  6. 29Apr · WedTorontoOntarioSpindle & Quire, OssingtonIn conversation with Rosalind Fyfe · 7 pmSold out · waitlist
  7. 02May · SatBostonMassachusettsCalder & Finch Books, CambridgeReading and signing · 3 pmFree
  8. 23May · SunMahone BayEbb Tide Literary FestivalA sea-glass walk at low tideLow water at 6:42 am. Boots required, coffee provided.$25 · 30 places
Preorder

Preorder now, and the tide brings something back.

Preorder any edition before April 14 and we’ll post you a signed bookplate and a bookmark printed with the Gull Ledge chart, while 3,000 last. First printings have the sprayed edges.

$32.99CAD · $28.00 US

384 pages · 6 × 9 in · ISBN 978-1-9992-4127-0

Already preordered? Claim your gift.

Tell us where you ordered and we’ll post the bookplate and bookmark in March.

For book clubs

Bring it to the table.

The kit is free. It has twelve questions, a printable sea-glass chart and Agnes’s blueberry grunt, which is less a recipe than an argument.

  • Discussion guideTwelve questions, chapter by chapter · 8 pages
  • The sea-glass chartEvery color, dated and ranked · prints at 11 × 17 in
  • Agnes’s blueberry gruntServes six, argues with everyone
  • A visit from IsobelBy video, for clubs of eight or more, Tuesday evenings through June
Download the kit · PDF Request a visit

Eight of the twelve questions

  1. Agnes can date any piece of glass by its color. What does she get wrong when she tries to date people the same way?
  2. The letter in the kitchen wall was never posted. Who do you think decided not to send it, and why?
  3. Hollis arrives with a suitcase “built for airports.” How does the novel use objects to tell us who belongs where?
  4. The bottle works shaped Gull Ledge long after it closed. What does the town still owe it, and what does it owe the town?
  5. The sea gives everything back, eventually. By the last chapter, is that a promise or a threat?
  6. Why do you think the 1958 chapters are told in the second person?
  7. Agnes has never kept a red piece until now. What changes when she does?
  8. Which character would you most like to walk the beach with at low tide, and what would you ask them?

Agnes’s blueberry grunt

Serves six
  • 4 cups wild blueberries
  • ¾ cup sugar, ½ cup water
  • Juice of half a lemon
  • 1½ cups flour
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • 2 tbsp cold butter, ¾ cup milk

Simmer the berries. Drop the dough on in spoonfuls, cover, and do not lift the lid for fifteen minutes, whatever anyone tells you.