The Great Offshore Grounds

base with lines that lead nowhere and do nothing.
 
 
Back across the sound in Seattle, Livy looked out the window of her basement apartment. Her father was getting married that afternoon, and though it was already late April, a cold, wet breeze still whistled through the gaps in the caulking turning her skin to goose-flesh. A few feet away stood her sister, Cheyenne, poorly slept but already dressed.
 
I m freezing, said Cheyenne.
 
I m turning on the space heater.
 
Turn on the oven. They charge us for electricity, Livy said.
 
Cheyenne rolled her eyes but went over to the little white gas stove. Cranking the temperature to broil, she leaned back against the oven door so she could feel the heat on her hamstrings while the oven warmed.
 
Yesterday they d spent the whole day picking rocks out of Livy s landlord s garden in trade for a patch of soil near the sunny side of the fence so that Livy could grow food. It wasn t political. Livy didn t care about pesticides or permaculture. She was just the cheapest person Cheyenne had ever known. She lived off past-date groceries. She washed her clothes once a month with a teaspoon of dish soap in a tub. She made her own bras. Cheyenne was pretty sure she would have rinsed and reused dental dams if she thought it would work. Recently, Livy had become convinced she could feed herself off three square yards of land. It was ridiculous, but since Cheyenne had appeared out of nowhere and moved in on her without warning or rent, she didn t have much of a say.
 
Taller and unfreckled, Cheyenne had chosen a rose-colored capped-sleeve shirt with eyelets and a pair of black pinstriped suit pants. She could pass in the crowd they d be in today. Her secondhand clothes came off as vintage, while her misadventures in body art made her

This is a twisty, chunky yarn of a novel engineered for total absorption."
Vulture, "The 10 Best Books of 2020"

A magnificent beast of a novel. Utterly engrossing. Original. One of the rare novels that understands the realities of American poverty. Epic.  
Roxane Gay, author of Difficult Women 

"The Great Offshore Grounds reminded me of what a great novel can do Veselka's seafaring epic has the forward momentum of a grand adventure and the spiraling depth of a new myth. All the pleasure of eighteenth century storytelling renewed for our newborn millennium. I love this textured, tonally complex wonder of a book, a quest for Melville's 'unimaginable sublimity' that never shies away from the messy flux of the body, or the oceanic scope of our shared global history. It's also a blast to read darkly hilarious, astral, cerebral, suspenseful, warm-blooded, divine." 
Karen Russell, author of Orange World

"I immediately fell in love with the phenomenal sisters at the heart of Vanessa Veselka's supernova of a new novel, The Great Offshore Grounds. This novel is thrilling in its content, daring in heart, and makes a helix between a novel of ideas and the best damn story of women who forge their identities on their own terms that I've read in years."
Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Verge

"The Great Offshore Grounds delivers on the promise Vanessa Veselka made with her excellent debut, Zazen. Large in scope and heart, Veselka skillfully illustrates human behaviors of every shade and iteration. She s a specialist, a keen interpreter of our demented society, and an enviable storyteller. I ve been waiting long years for this novel. It was worth the wait." 
Patrick deWitt, author of French Exit

"Vanessa Veselka is an expert portraitist of the forgotten and left behind, people struggling to make ends meet, broke and underemployed, people of deep humanity and shallow finances trying to find their place in dysfunctional America. The Great Offshore Grounds is an unforgettable journey through a country full of malice and greed and beauty and grace. A brilliant and fearless book." 
Nathan Hill, author of The Nix

"Vanessa Veselka writes with the power of the ocean tides, and The Great Offshore Grounds teems with life as beguiling and beautiful as any undersea grotto. This novel is warmhearted and coldblooded and I ll never forget Livy and Cheyenne and their fierce bond and bottomless wonder. Neither will you."     
Peter Geye, author of Northernmost

"The Great Offshore Grounds is a binge-worthy, kaleidoscopic, twenty-first century American family odyssey. Vanessa Veselka spins a radical, delicious, epic tale of women blasting their way forward to free themselves of the past. Her characters play by no rules but their own and they pull you in with oceans of black humor and so much heart." 
Andrea Kleine, author of Eden 

"The Great Offshore Grounds blew me away. The tangled journeys of three siblings in the hardest of times pursuing freedom and love through a broken world will both move and dazzle readers. Wry, epic, glorious." 
Emma Donoghue, author of Akin

This is a novel that feels like hitchhiking: The route is unpredictable but fated and exciting, with an air of treachery. If you relate to the idea of desperate people doing desperate things for reasons only partly clear to themselves, you will find it thrilling.  
Molly Young, Vulture

Astonishing depth and scope . . . Veselka blends fascinating details of seamanship, cab driving, and boot camp with intimate, spot-on descriptions of contemporary American poverty . . . This gritty and unsentimental work is compassionate, funny, and deeply human.  
Publishers Weekly (starred) 

Energetic . . . points of view shift kaleidoscopically, passages of history and politics are woven into the questlike narratives of the characters. The result is a fiery and occasionally luminous chaos that feels true to the experience of those for whom each day is lived at the edges of mainstream society.  
Kirkus