Great and Wide Sea by Deborah Wagnon

Hurricane, eminent domain, class, gender, murder, a mother’s love… All of these story elements fuse powerfully into Deborah Wagnon’s Great and Wide Sea, an epic novel spanning the life of Southern lawyer Neva Majette who grows up in an isolated world as the daughter of a Lighthouse Keep off of the Georgia coast. The novel begins in 1907, ends in 1966 and tells the unusual story of a life bound to the sea. As a young woman, Neva must surrender her only child for adoption and later becomes one of the first women to sit for the Bar in 1930’s Georgia. It is Neva’s fate that brings her son back, and fate that determines she must advocate to save the weak, spoiled barrier island heir who abandoned her years before. With its powerful Southern legacy and overwhelming sense of history and place, Great And Wide Sea recalls both the work of Margaret Mitchell in Gone With The Wind and the page-turning legal intrigue of John Grisham’s The Firm. This novel is an absorbing account steeped in the lore of the sea, islands, wilderness, passionate characters, a segregated society, and the passage of time from 1907 to 1966… The book’s power comes from the reader’s identification with Neva Majette’s journey, from the sense of place and history in this country, and the universal desire for finding peace of spirit, and home.
Mariana Romo-Carmona, Author, New York City Deborah has woven into her novel wonderful twists and turns—the lives which become entangled at the start of the novel remain entangled in surprising, fresh ways…filled with the kind of detail and specifics that make the reader feel as if they are being introduced to a world the author knows well. The sea is always present in the novel, as is the Lighthouse; the novel abounds with the sights, sounds and smells of this place perched on the edge of the ocean. There is a lovely sweeping feel to her novel as well; it has the size and scope of an epic…”
Deborah Brevoort, Playwright, N. Bergen, New Jersey

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