Everything to the Sea

A Novel

By: Alicia Upano

Part riveting love story, part coming-of-age tale, Everything to the Sea is a breathtaking debut novel spanning years and shores after a sudden tsunami devastates the island of Hawai’i and cuts short a young couple’s budding romance—a deeply moving testament to the catastrophes love can endure.

This is how the story goes: Jane will fall in love. And then all of this will vanish.

Home for one final summer, Jane is working and saving cash for her senior year of college before she leaves her island town behind forever. At first, she doesn’t remember Kenji, but he quickly becomes someone she can’t forget: square jaw, a dimple in his cheek. A Hilo boy. To Kenji, she’s Janie, nose perpetually buried in her old high school sketchbooks. Jane tells herself it’s only a fling—one perfect, carefree summer, on her way to achieving her dream of becoming an architect and moving to the continent.

Then a tsunami sweeps their families out to sea, and their all-consuming affair breaks with the weight of grief, pulling them in opposite directions. Kenji remains in Hawai’i, bound by duty to rebuild their hometown. Jane, shattered by the loss, follows her best friend to California. For seven years, an ocean lies between them, until Jane and Kenji meet on another coast . . .

In prose that sparkles like sun on the water, Upano’s debut novel tells the unforgettable story of two young people as they come of age, fall in love, forge new families, and try to find their way back together, again and again. Everything to the Sea is a moving portrait of our ability to overcome even the most devastating tragedies, when everything else is washed away.