From award-winning author, Patricia Engel, The Veins of the Ocean is the profound and riveting story of a young woman’s journey away from her family’s painful past towards redemption and a freer future. Reina Castillo’s beloved brother is serving a death sentence for a crime that shocked the community—a crime for which Reina secretly blames herself. When she is at last released from her seven-year prison vigil, Reina moves to a sleepy town in the Florida Keys seeking anonymity, and meets Nesto, a recently exiled Cuban awaiting the arrival of the children he left behind in Havana. Through Nesto’s love of the sea and capacity for faith, Reina comes to understand her own connections to the life-giving and destructive forces of the ocean that surrounds her, as well as its role in her family’s troubled history and their crossing of the Caribbean to make the United States their home.
Set in the vibrant coastal communities of Miami, the Florida Keys, Havana, Cuba, and Cartagena, Colombia, The Veins of the Ocean is a wrenching exploration of what happens when life tests the limits of compassion, and a stunning and unforgettable portrait of fractured lives finding solace in the beauty and power of the natural world, and in one another.