An Ocean Without a Shore

A wildly entertaining and occasionally heartbreaking story of frustrated longing, and the lengths we will go for those we love--even if they don't love us in return An Ocean Without a Shore, from the bestselling, critically acclaimed author of Endless Love and Man in the Woods, is a beautifully rendered exploration of that most timeless of human dilemmas: the one in which your love is left unreturned. Since their college days, Kip Woods has been infatuated with Thaddeus Kaufman, who, years later, is a married father of two children and desperately trying to revive a failing career. Kip's devotion to Thaddeus has been life-defining and destiny-altering, but it has been one that Thaddeus has either failed to notice or refused to acknowledge. But over the course of this heated and mesmerizing novel, set against a background of privilege and affluence in Manhattan and the Hudson Valley, Kip will be forced to reckon with the prison of his own making and decide how much he is willing to sacrifice for a love that may never be shared. Picking up where his most recent novel, River Under the Road, left off, but writing squarely in the vein of Endless Love, his classic novel of passion and obsession, Scott Spencer gives us an intimate, immersive, and unsettling portrait of the devastation we will wreak in the name of love, and the bitterness of a friendship ravaged by fathomless yearning.

About the Author :
Scott Spencer is the author of twelve novels, including Endless Love, Waking the Dead, A Ship Made of Paper, and Willing. He has taught at Columbia University, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Williams College, the University of Virginia, and at Eastern Correctional Facility as part of the Bard Prison Initiative. He lives in upstate New York.

Review :
"An Ocean Without a Shore is a classic Scott Spencer novel: as always, he writes masterfully on the pain of longing and traces, with exacting detail, the hidden forces that animate his character's lives. Spencer is one of my very favorite writers, and this is a wonderful book." - Emma Cline "Spencer's writing is always a pleasure." - Kirkus Reviews "Love hurts, power corrupts, and money makes the world go round, but it takes a first-rate artist to say something new and final about all three. In An Ocean Without A Shore, Scott Spencer proves just that. A fierce observer with the soul of a romantic, he knows what matters most: that our folly, put on display, should wreck, ravish, engulf us." - Joshua Ferris "In elegantly turned phrases and brilliantly nuanced dialogue, Scott Spencer has populated 'An Ocean without a Shore' with fully formed, complex, deeply sympathetic characters, each of whom shines a dazzling light on what men and women will do in the name of love." - Francine Prose "If you entertain any doubts about love's capacity to lacerate us, to transfigure us, to redeem us even as it crushes us, Scott Spencer's An Ocean Without a Shore will put those doubts to rest. It's a harrowing, insidiously gorgeous, entirely remarkable novel." - Michael Cunningham "Brutal, romantic and totally absorbing, An Ocean Without a Shore is about people you thought you knew, people who, it turns out, you didn't know at all. Spencer is masterful at describing the way side-lined passion can grow huge, anguished and absolutely essential." - Mary Gaitskill "Spencer has a gift for depicting the ecstasies and torments of romantic love with crisp detail and deliberate restraint, and it is this quality, together with Kip's haunted narrative voice, that give this tale special resonance." - Booklist