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Following The Highest Tide, Border Songs, and Truth Like the Sun, Jim Lynch now gives us a grand and idiosyncratic family saga that will stand alongside Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion.
Joshua Johannssen has spent all of his life surrounded by sailboats. His grandfather designed them, his father built and raced them, his Einstein-obsessed mother knows why and how they work (or not). For Josh and his two siblings, their backyard was the Puget Sound and sailing their DNA. But both his sister and brother fled many years ago: Ruby to Africa and elsewhere to do good works on land, and Bernard to god-knows-where at sea, a fugitive and pirate. Suddenly thirty-one, Josh - who repairs boats of all kinds in a Steinbeckian marina south of Seattle - is pained and confused by whatever the hell went wrong with his volatile family. His parents are barely speaking, his mystified grandfather is drinking harder, and he himself - despite an endless and comic flurry of online dates - hasn't even come close to finding a girlfriend.
But when the Johannssens unexpectedly reunite for the most important race in these waters - all of them together on a classic vessel they made decades ago - they will be carried to destinies both individual and collective, and to a heart-shattering revelation. Past and present merge seamlessly and collide surprisingly as Jim Lynch reveals a family unlike any other, with the grace and humor and magic of a master storyteller.
"Starred Review. A cautionary tale of obsession ... Lynch dissects an uncommon family with, after all, more than one thing in common in a highly readable tale." - Kirkus
"Lynch writes both humorously and movingly about one family's lifelong love of sailing. For those who love a good sea story, this novel will be as bracing as salt spray during an autumn sail." - Publishers Weekly
"Lynch has won some nice honors, plus appreciative reviews, but now it's breakout time." - Library Journal
"Lynch brings his usual gifts - a wide-ranging mind, an ear for precise but musical language, empathy, intelligence, and imagination - to what may be his best yet. I so loved this book!" - Karen Joy Fowler
"Heartbreaking yet affirmative, so emotionally powerful that I had to look up from the pages several times to regain my own bearings, Before the Wind reveals the ways in which family ties, however tenuous and imperiled, are what best define us frail, wondrous human beings, sailors and landsmen alike." - Howard Frank Mosher
"Jim Lynch does for sailing what A River Runs Through It did for fly-fishing. A family whose religion is sea, wind, and motion. All the complexities and exhilarations of family, failure and the ties that hold us together set to the addictive rush of hulls slicing through water. A beautiful book that smells of the sea with every turn of the page." - Luis Urrea
"This is a terrific book. I love that Einstein is from beginning to end its genius loci, and that the endlessly changing physics of sailing are mirrored by the fluid dynamics of the Johanssen family. Lynch writes as if every single one of his myriad details comes from intimate first-hand experience." - Jonathan Raban
"With its unforgettable setting, irresistible warmth, and oddball cast of characters, Lynch has given us a Cannery Row for the Great Northwest. This is that rare book you can recommend to anyone." - Jonathan Evison
"Glorious. Put a rambunctious family clan of misfits and genius sailors in Jim Lynch's masterful hands, and what you get is a gorgeous, full-bodied novel that contains pretty much all of life, from the agonies of online dating and boat repair to Einstein's sublime quest for a 'simple and beautiful' unifying theory of everything." - Ben Fountain
This information about Before the Wind was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Denise Lynch
The author of four novels set in Western Washington including Before the Wind, (April 2016). Lynch's first novel, The Highest Tide (2005), won the Pacific Northwest Bookseller Award, was performed on stage in Seattle and became an international bestseller after it was featured on England's Richard and Judy television show. His second novel, Border Songs (2009), was also adapted to the stage and won the Washington State Book Award as well as the Indie's Choice Honor Book Award. His novel, Truth Like the Sun, was a finalist for the Dashiell Hammett Prize, given to the best literary crime fiction in North America.
Lynch grew up in the Seattle area and graduated from the University of Washington before bouncing around the country as a reporter for newspapers in Alaska, Virginia and for ...
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