Alone on a Wide Wide Sea by William Clark Russell

In the quiet west of England, Agnes Campbell sits at tea with her husband John, their young son, and her twin sister Mary, while the calm of family life is shadowed by a promise of something strange and terrible to come. Agnes recalls the past: her girlhood in Bath, the death of her father, the modest household she shared with Mary and their mother, and the understated courtship of the solicitor John Campbell, whose marriage to Agnes brings happiness but also leaves Mary dependent on the new household after their mother dies. When the family chooses a seaside holiday on the Bristol Channel, John's practical judgment leads them away from fashionable resorts to a lonely town called Piertown, where storm, cliff, and surf create a scene of wild beauty and unease. There, the narrator's fascination with the sea deepens into danger. A boating excursion ends in crisis, and she wakes wounded and disoriented among strangers, unable to remember her name or past. Tended by the kind French sailor Alphonse, his uncle, and a stern, watchful companion, she clings to fragments of sensation and to the initials "A. C." on her handkerchief, while the mystery of her identity and the haunting contrast between domestic warmth and maritime peril grow ever more intense. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.