In the eerie, dreamlike speculative love story Habits of the Sea by Shea Ernshaw (A History of Wild Places), a woman encounters a fabled floating island and the enigmatic, ageless man who lives there.
Ellie has built herself a stable, predictable adult life after a childhood characterized by upheaval. Her mother sent her to stay with her grandmother in Nova Scotia and never reclaimed her. At age 12, Ellie took her Nana's boat into a storm and found the mythical floating island of Saltwell. When she returned to the mainland, she learned that she had been missing for a week. Now grown, Ellie works as a therapist in Seattle and has just received a marriage proposal from her handsome, reliable boyfriend, James. Everything is falling into place, but "when I close my eyes, I see the ocean." Then Saltwell reappears near the Faroe Islands, and Ellie gives in to the impulse to go there and prove once and for all whether the island exists.
She finds the island just as she remembers it, complete with one lonely house inhabited by the solitary Scotsman Clay Lockhart, who hasn't aged a day since she last saw him. The island drifts back out to sea before Ellie can return to the mainland. Then there's Clay, taciturn yet compelling, who rouses feelings in Ellie that James never could. She will have to make an almost impossible choice between a safe life and truly living. Ernshaw's intimate gothic drama plays out against a dangerous yet beautiful setting. This love story has grit, complexity, and a core of darkness under a patina of wildness and freedom. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads