Atlantic Places by Ron Ennis

Novel

“Carrick has a restless bone and his big ghost of the East is the mighty Atlantic . . . its Rio de Janeiro, its Newfoundland, and its lesser coastal haunts. His weakness for substance and his old wounds—the death of his sister—propel him to lunge at the dragons he meets in the shadowy turbines of life. That he fails, and how he fails, when all the whales are finally breaching, is the great mystery of this debut novel. Ennis is an honest shell-backer. He’s not the sort of author who Googles for interesting details. He’s lived all of them, and keeled the boats himself. Only someone who has outrun his demons can write so well about a protagonist chasing his own.”

—Henri Le Pont, author of Death and Stuff