Debut Novel Features Haunting View of Coastal Maine.

Yarmouth, Maine author Sarah Beth Martin has written The One True Ocean, a novel about a womans search for answers to her familys mysterious past. The story takes place in the fictional town of Cape Wood, Maine, and features the Southern Maine coast as a lush but haunting backdrop.

Yarmouth, Me -- August, 2003 -- Yarmouth, Maine author Sarah Beth Martin has written The One True Ocean (Sourcebooks Landmark, ISBN 1-4022-0143-5, October, $14.00 U.S./$22.00 CAN, trade paperback), a novel about a womans search for answers to her familys mysterious past. The story takes place in the fictional town of Cape Wood, Maine, and features the Southern Maine coast as a lush but haunting backdrop.

In this debut novel, a young woman is anguished over the sudden death of her husband and longs for escape from her grief. When a newspaper article reveals that her beloved aunts death twenty years ago was a suicide, she is shocked and angry that her parents never told her the truth. She also is intrigued by the mystery surrounding her aunts death, just one of the many blurry memories of her childhood. She decides to move back to her childhood home on the coast of Maine, where she lived with her aunt and mother before her adoptive father came along.

Upon settling in, mysteries of the past begin to unearth themselves from within the very walls of the house, the soil of the yard and from reappearing faces from long ago. What begins as an escape into her aunts past becomes an exploration of her own identity and guilt, and in a search for answers she discovers dark secrets that will unravel her family history and shatter the truth she has come to believe.

The One True Ocean features the lush nature of coastal Maine as its backdrop, examining not only its beauty but also the darkness that lurks just beneath the surface. This haunting theme resonates throughout the novel, mixing dark psychology into an eloquent narrative style. Publishers Weekly describes Martin as "a smooth, engaging storyteller."

Martin grew up among creative parents and siblings and is an artist of various media. She established the journal Foliage, for which she worked as editor and publisher, and which featured the work of writers from Maine and beyond. Her stories have appeared in several literary journals, including West Wind Review, Pearl and animus, among others, and will appear in an upcoming issue of Cicada. She lives in coastal Maine, where she is at work on a second novel.

The One True Ocean is available in bookstores this October and is currently available for pre-order on popular book sites such as Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble (bn.com).