The Standing Sea

The night the sky bent, one astronomer understood that the world was already over.

Twenty years on the summit of Mauna Kea taught Cole Harlan to love old light - the patient glow of galaxies that left before there were eyes on Earth to want it. Then, on an ordinary night, the deep field warps on his monitor. The fixed bedrock of the sky, the background against which everything else is measured, is bending - and Cole becomes the only living person who knows the heavens have a flaw in them.

What the numbers tell him is impossible to say out loud. Something massive and invisible is crossing the solar system. The Moon is coming apart, and when it goes, the sea will stand up and walk inland.

He carries the warning down the mountain to a world that listens too late - to a President who wants six weeks, to a father whose mind is going out like a tide, to coastlines that drown one named city at a time. And as the water rises, Cole turns away from the equations that were his whole life and toward the only thing that was ever truly his to save: the people waiting for him at the edge of the rising sea.

The Standing Sea is a literary novel about the end of the world and the stubbornness of love - about keeping watch, keeping faith, and the faint possibility, written into the mathematics itself, that what is lost might yet come back.