Winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, A New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the International Latino Book Award

Lush and entrancing, steeped in love and sorrow, faith and myth… Patricia Engel is a gorgeous writer and I love the confidence of her prose. She knows the story she is telling, inside and out. She knows the story and its unfathomable depths and so that’s how we experience reading this novel–fully, deeply, like an ocean. –Roxane Gay for Book of the Month Club From award-winning author, Patricia Engel, The Veins of the Ocean is the profound and riveting story of a young woman’s journey away from her family’s painful past towards redemption and a freer future. Set in the vibrant coastal communities of Miami, the Florida Keys, Havana, and Cartagena, The Veins of the Ocean is a wrenching exploration of what happens when life tests the limits of compassion, and a stunning and unforgettable portrait of fractured lives finding solace in the beauty and power of the natural world, and in one another.

[A] profound, daring venture … [Engel is] a unique and necessary voice for the Americas … the book is a great pleasure to read, even while it’s breaking your heart. –San Francisco Chronicle
Sumptuous … This is a writer who understands that exile can be as much an emotional state as a geographical one … to immerse oneself in Engel’s prose is to surrender to a seductive embrace, a hypnotic beauty that mingles submersion with submission. –New York Times Book Review