The Starboard Sea (DERMONT, Amber)

JASON PROSPER GREW UP IN THE ELITE WORLD OF MANHATTAN PENTHOUSES, Maine summer estates, old-boy prep schools, and exclusive sailing clubs. A smart, athletic teenager, Jason maintains a healthy, humorous disdain for the trappings of affluence, preferring to spend afternoons sailing with Cal, his best friend and boarding-school roommate. When Cal commits suicide during their junior year at Kensington Prep, Jason is devastated by the loss and transfers to Bellingham Academy. There, he meets Aidan, a fellow student with her own troubled past. They embark on a tender, awkward, deeply emotional relationship.

When a major hurricane hits the New England coast, the destruction it causes brings with it another upheaval in Jason’s life, forcing him to make sense of a terrible secret that has been buried by the boys he considers his friends.

Set against the backdrop of the 1987 stock-market collapse, The Starboard Sea is an examination of the abuses of class privilege, the mutability of sexual desire, the thrill and risk of competitive sailing, and the adult cost of teenage recklessness. It is a powerful and provocative novel about a young man finding his moral center, trying to forgive himself, and accepting the gift of love.

“Engrossing...captivating and inspired. Jason is a fiercely likeable first-person narrator and romantic hero. Dermont’s prose glides across the ocean....The language of sailing is lovely, both simple and elaborate, unexpectedly sexy, and inexhaustibly metaphorical.” —The New York Times

“The Starboard Sea is a touching, beautiful, and deeply wise novel, a hymn to the bittersweet glories of youth. You will be enthralled.” —Justin Cronin, New York Times, bestselling author of The Passage and The Twelve

“A rich, quietly artful novel that is bound for deep water, with questions of beauty, power, and spiritual navigation as its main concerns.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times

AMBER DERMONT received her MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her short stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including Dave Eggers’s Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005, Francis Ford Coppolas Zoetrope: All-Story, and Jane Smiley’s Best New American Voices 2006. A graduate of Vassar College, she received her Ph.D. in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston. She currently serves as an associate professor of English and creative writing at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, and is also the author of Damage Control.

Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein.

Cover photographs: school © Pamela Hanson/Trunk Archive; prep boys © Richard Phibbs/Trunk Archive.

Author photo by T. W. Meyer
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