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Title: Secrets of the Sea

Author: Nicholas Shakespeare

Narrator: Stan Pretty

Format: Unabridged

Length: 15 hrs and 4 mins

Language: English

Release date: 07-09-08

Publisher: Whole Story Audiobooks

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Longing for children, they take in a teenage castaway, whose presence begins to unravel their tenuously forged happiness, while at the same time offering the prospect of a much greater fulfilment.

Critic Reviews:

"Expertly crafted, the novel illuminates love's craggy depths." (Publishers Weekly)

Members Reviews:

Great reading

Just a little difficult to follow the first few pages then one of the best stories I've read in a long time. The characters are complex, interesting and believable. The story builds and builds. Just a great read. I've all ready bought it for 2 other friends. Highly rec this novel. May be better than " The Dancer Upstairs".

secrets of the sea

I loved this book. He writes like a native Australian. Insightful and moving. It was all tied together despite the story taking so many different directions. I will be reading more Nicholas Shakespeare.

"You'd better start living. We're dead an awfully long time."

(4.5 stars) Set on the remote southeast coast of Tasmania, the isolated island at the southernmost tip of Australia, Nicholas Shakespeare's latest novel examines the lives of Alex and Merridy Dove as they try to create satisfying lives, cope with traumatic childhood memories, and ultimately decide that "[We'd] better start living. We're dead an awfully long time." Wellington Point, the fictional town in which they live on Tasmania's southeast coast, faces Oyster Bay, a battered shoreline open to ferocious gales coming from the nearest land mass to the south--Antarctica--a place where only the hardiest and most independent souls manage to wrest a living from the land or the sea.

Alex and Merridy Dove have both faced tragedy. Alex lost both of his parents when he was only eleven, after which he was sent to England. Returning twelve years later, he meets and falls in love with Merridy, whose much-adored brother vanished when he was seven and she was five. Though she does not love Alex when they are married, she believes that she will learn to love him, and they look forward to having a family and living on the farm.

Shakespeare, who lives in Tasmania for four months a year, creates a vibrant picture of life at Wellington Point, and of the connections the inhabitants forge with each other and with the land and the sea. Moving back and forth in time, the novel provides the individual backgrounds of all the characters, their courtships and love affairs, their hopes for the future, and their personal interests. As Alex, the realist-farmer, and his wife, the believer in dreams, await the arrival of children who do not arrive, their lives and their marriage are tested.

The leisurely pace of this seemingly domestic novel quickens with the arrival of Kish, a teenage orphan whom Alex and Merridy rescue from a ferocious storm. Kish is part of a program to give young boys in trouble a chance to learn from their experiences on a three-month sail around the island. Merridy and Alex give Kish a place to stay and a job, each of them trying to force Kish into their memories of the past and their dreams for the future. Ultimately, all three of them feel betrayed.

The novel, which has been rooted in reality for about three quarters of its length, changes dramatically with the arrival of Kish, as various characters begin to experience illusions and see ghosts of the past.