Tea By The Sea

Named Best Novel (Adult) in Rebel Women Lit's Caribbean Readers Award andfeatured in Oprah Magazine

Selected for the National Reading Group Month 2020 Great Group Reads List

Named a Best Bookof the Week by New York Post

Featured in MsMagazine'sJune 2020 Reads for the Rest of Us

Featured in LitHub's 5 Books You May Have Missed in June​

Winner of the Lignum Vitae Una Marson Award for Adult Literature

From Brooklyn to the island of Jamaica, Tea by the Sea traces a mother’s circuitous route to finding the daughter taken from her at birth.

A seventeen-year-old taken from her mother at birth, an Episcopal priest with a daughter whose face he cannot bear to see, a mother weary of searching for her lost child: Tea by the Sea is their story—that of a family uniting and unraveling. To find the daughter taken from her, Plum Valentine must find the child’s father who walked out of a hospital with the day-old baby girl without explanation. Seventeen years later, weary of her unfruitful search, Plum sees an article in a community newspaper with a photo of the man for whom she has spent half her life searching. He has become an Episcopal priest. Her plan: confront him and walk away with the daughter he took from her. From Brooklyn to the island of Jamaica, Tea by the Sea traces Plum’s circuitous route to finding her daughter and how Plum’s and the priest’s love came apart.

Advance Praise

"Tea by the Sea is a well-written novel exploring the themes of agency, love, and loss. The reverberations of Lenworth’s decision will be fodder for a great book-group discussion."—Booklist

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"Tea By the Sea is a powder keg of a novel, where secrets and lies explode into truth and consequences, all told with spellbinding, shattering power. Hemans doesn't just fulfill the promise of her debut—she soars past it."—Marlon James, Man Booker Prize Winning author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf.

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"The forbidden love story of Plum and Lenworth comes alive in this heart-rending novel,Tea by the Sea.Hemans has a stunning ability to give words to that elusive feeling of emptiness, and the longing for redemption is palpable. In Hemans’s deft hands, regrets are explored with precision and compassion so that the reader finds herself unable to turn against even characters who have committed the most wretched betrayals. Tea by the Sea is like the story told in a grandmother’s kitchen with the odors of fried dumplings and saltfish wafting into mouths that are set agape at the heady twists and turns delivered in an urgent and beautiful prose.” —Lauren Francis-Sharma, author of’Til the Well Runs Dry

“Tea by the Seais an insightful and illuminating prism of a novel, deftly examining familial identity and personal transformation. Hemans turns the kaleidoscope, catching light at different angles, to show us how one person’s act of honor and responsibility can also be an act of unspeakable betrayal.” —Carolyn Parkhurst, author ofThe Dogs of BabelandHarmony

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Now Available

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