Synopsis

“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 find her daughter and how Plum’s and the priest’s love came apart”

Amazon * B&N * IndieBound * The Booksmith * Bookshop

Praise

“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 Sea is 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 of The Dogs of Babel and Harmony

Excerpt

Plum shook her head, moved toward the spreading pool, newspaper in hand and layered it on top of the water sheet by sheet.

And drew her breath. It was a hiccup, really. She looked again, closer this time, back bent, water dripping from one half of the newsprint. She ripped the sheet in half, dropped the wet half to the floor, then moved toward the window, sheet in hand, for a closer look in the natural light.

Unmistakable.
Lenworth.
She hadn’t forgotten the face, the half-smile, the thick brows, the thin nose. Below the photo, a caption with his name and his title: Priest.

Unmistakably him.

Outside, the rain that had set up came with force, pummeling the plants that had withstood summer, and flooding the gutters and the nearly empty roads. The wind whipped the rain around, sprinkling raindrops against the windows like pebbles on glass. East 33rd Street was otherwise quiet, with everyone, it seemed, hunkered down, waiting out the mid-afternoon downpour in place.

Plum waited out the rain just within view of her laughing, cavorting girls. She held the newspaper up, using the pages as a shield from the girls’ gaze. At least for the moment, Nia had given up the cartwheels and handstands and she sat with Vivian playing jacks. Behind the newspaper, Plum’s calcified grief, all seventeen years of it, broke apart, and tears almost as fierce as the rain dribbled down her cheeks, settling uncomfortably in the corners of her mouth.

The girls, absorbed by their game of jacks, didn’t pay attention to the sniffles coming from behind the newspaper. Plum could have moved to a quieter room—the windowless bathroom, perhaps—to cry unchecked, without worrying about the girls eventually gazing and questioning the reason for her tears. Instead, she chose to remain behind the newspaper, to cry without sound and let the tears roll down her face. Surely, if she had moved in search of seclusion, one or both of the girls would have followed her, wandering through every room until they found her again and transported their game within her line of sight.

Plum wiped her eyes on her sleeve and looked again at the man in the center of the photo, surrounded by a group of community leaders. Other than the hairline that had receded, he was exactly as she remembered him. Thick lips, a deep pink like a painted hibiscus bloom. Thick, bushy brows came close to meeting in the center of his face, their fullness like a miniature ledge shielding eyes that seemed to capture everything. A thin nose. He was a little thicker, of course, but not significantly so. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that the man who had disappeared like a deep-water creature into the depths of the ocean had resurfaced in Brooklyn, skimming the water for a long breath of air. He was within reach, a catch she could finally haul in. But how long before he dipped his head and swam again out of reach?

Nia called her mother to stand in as referee for the girls’ own inconsistent and slippery rules.

“Coming.” Plum wiped her eyes on her sleeve, roughly, quickly, and forced herself to smile as if smiling was another one of those things she had to practice how to do convincingly. She counted her breaths, one, two, one, two, then faced the girls, her actions suggesting that all that mattered were the oversized neon ball and jacks scattered before them on the floor.

Published with permission from the publisher

About the Author

Jamaican-born Donna Hemans is the author of the novel River Woman, winner of the 2003-4 Towson University Prize for Literature. Tea by the Sea, for which she won the Lignum Vitae Una Marson Award for Adult Literature, is her second novel. Her short fiction has appeared in the Caribbean Writer, Crab Orchard Review, Witness, and the anthology Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad, among others. She received her undergraduate degree from Fordham University and an MFA from American University. She lives in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Website * Twitter * Instagram * Facebook

Giveaway

**Open to US and Caribbean residents only**

a Rafflecopter giveaway

You can follow the full blog tour via Donna’s website. Check out reviews and giveaways