The Sea-Cure
The Sea-Cure, a novel of journeys in the seventeenth century will transport you, dear reader, far beyond the first passage from Holland to Tenerife, aboard a merchant ship that also carries misfits and the mad sent away from their towns as outcasts. The ship sails between known and unknown islands, where the voyageurs traverse human and animal realms, beauty and beastliness, servitude and freedom, isolation and love. You’ll discover what brings together Hans, a handsome but poor Dutchman who tends the mad aboard ship, and Toñina, a fascinating Spanish lady of Tenerife whose bewildering appearance, an oddity inherited from her father, challenges all who meet her with both aversion and wonder. Shipwrecked on an unknown island, they will encounter and create the strange new geography of their lives.
Praise & Reviews
“The Sea-Cure is a marvel of lyrical prose, fantastical characters and deep, earthy wisdom. Regina O’Melveny brings us into the wondrous, gritty world of a 16th century ocean voyage, as well as on a mystical journey to the lost edge of the known world. We meet a beautiful, rich woman who has retained her ancestors’ animal fur, a handsome, impoverished printer’s apprentice, and the beings who live as beekeepers on a lost island. Along the way we imagine what it would be to unshackle ourselves from our tightly bound urban lives, to regrow our fur, to let lose our hair, to learn to speak with others on the wind. Read this book and take a journey into your truest self.”
—Carolyn Brigit Flynn, author of Communion, and editor of Sacred Stone, Sacred Water
“The Sea-Cure is a wonderful elixir for the reader who craves adventure full of magic and mystery. Inhabited by characters longing to escape the confines of an unjust world, the novel sends us to the mythical past with a young man, orphaned young, who has a compassionate eye for the mad, and a brave young woman born with a coat of fur. Their love story, and sea adventure, make for the most enjoyable reading. Regina O’Melveny is a bold writer with a deft hand for the unusual and wondrous.”
—Monona Wali, author of My Blue Skin Lover
“The Sea-Cure leads us into the imagination the way someone we have forgotten rises into recognition like the wild emerging from a cave. Though Regina O’Melveny explores the recurring conflict between the known and the unknown, the familiar and the other, in an adventurous Renaissance setting, ultimately it is the mind and conscience of the natural world that she resurrects from deep memory. Poet and historian, both lyric and precise, O’Melveny uses her unique literary skills to immerse us in the wonder that is intrinsic to the earthen life at a time when the retreat to urban, domesticated and civilized forms and values endanger us all. The novel contains the mind and conscience of the natural world, of woman and man, spirit, and return. Through her artistry, first fully realized in The Book of Madness and Cures, she offers us a way of knowing that is full of awe.”
—Deena Metzger, author of La Negra y Blanca, winner of the 2012 PEN Oakland / Josephine Miles Literary Award, and Ruin and Beauty: New and Selected Poems