As many of you know, my debut novel Untamed Coast is being published this year by Ballantine/Penguin Random House. Untamed Coast is a cross-genre novel—book club fiction, mystery, thriller, and wilderness adventure—that spans three timelines, and maybe most importantly to Slowboat readers, it takes place largely on boats in SE Alaska!
I’m incredibly grateful for the years of support the Slowboat community has given this project. As we gear up for the release of Untamed Coast, I wanted to share a bit of ‘inside baseball’: Pre-orders are the single most important metric for a book’s success. They tell booksellers there is a real audience waiting, and they are the primary engine that drives a book onto the bestseller lists on launch day. If you’re planning to read the book, I’d be honored if you’d consider pre-ordering it now rather than waiting for release day. It makes a massive difference for the series. You can secure your copy from many of your favorite booksellers via this link:
Pre-Order Untamed Coast here
From the publisher:
A late-night mayday call drives a grieving man to embark on an unexpected journey along the wild Alaskan coast, unraveling a decades-old mystery of stolen gold, missing women, and murder in this atmospheric and propulsive debut novel.
After the loss of his wife, Marconi Franco is content drifting alone on his boat through the isolated waters of Southeast Alaska with no real destination in mind. But when a mysterious distress signal cuts through the static on his radio one sleepless night, Marco feels an overwhelming pull to help the woman whose plea he heard—a pull he can’t explain or ignore.
His search for the missing woman draws him to Radioville, an abandoned 1930s communication outpost now decaying on an uninhabited island off the coast of Alaska. There, Marco begins uncovering fragments of a story long forgotten: a Depression-era theft, a shattered marriage, and a disturbing pattern of disappearances. As he sifts through the past, his own grief starts to mirror the tragedies that echo across decades, and his search draws the attention of someone determined to keep the truth buried.
Told across three evocative timelines—a radio operator in 1938 collecting more than just telegrams, a young woman in the 1980s fighting to survive her abusive husband, and Marco in the present day searching for a voice in the static—Untamed Coast is a story of fierce determination, missed signals, loneliness and connection, and the unseen ripples that reverberate across generations, standing the test of time and the tides.
I’m super excited today to be able to publicly reveal the cover art!
