Books/ Landfall
Book 2 of the Ebb Tide Series
Landfall
He had been leaving since he was seven. Staying was the deepest water he would ever swim.
A year into the life Troy and Casey have built in secret, the world begins to press in: the law they serve under, a half-packed bag, a sister's unraveling marriage, the question of a child, and a mentor's unsaid years running short of time. Landfall is the story of what a made life has to weather.
A Southern literary novel of the Gulf Coast in the don't-ask-don't-tell era, by Cade Morrow.
Available in print and eBook.
About the book
A made life is the hardest thing to keep.
A year into the life they have built in secret, Troy and Casey have learned each other's mornings, the coffee, the cup set on the left, the wordless shorthand of two men who have stopped explaining themselves. But a life like theirs is never only theirs to hold.
There is the law they serve under, always listening. There is the bag Casey keeps half-packed, and the leaving he has done since he was a boy. There is a sister in Macon doing the quiet arithmetic of an end. There is the question of a child, and a door that will not open easily for men like them. And there is Magg, the man who taught Troy everything, with twenty years of things still unsaid between them, and the clock on those years suddenly visible.
Landfall is the second novel in the Ebb Tide Series: a story about what a made life has to weather, and what comes through the storm still standing.
Read the opening
Chapter 1
What the Shelf Remembers
I woke before four-thirty, which I have done most mornings since I was a soldier and which I have never quite stopped doing regardless of what the morning requires. The cabin was dark in the way of the panhandle in November, which is not entirely dark, the water outside carrying its own low luminosity in the winter months, and after thirty-three years of mornings in this cabin you stop needing any other light to navigate its rooms.
Casey was beside me.
I had been learning him in the dark since August. Not only in the dark. The quality of Casey in daylight was something I had been cataloguing since the first morning he stayed, the inventory conducted with the same precision I brought to everything I needed to understand. But the dark was where I had learned him most completely, the way you learn a geography in the dark that you cannot learn by sight: by repeated passage, by the knowledge of what comes next, by the understanding that has moved from the navigating into the person doing it, so that you no longer navigate at all but simply know.
He had been up before me and had not woken me. This was a thing I would not learn until I reached the kitchen and found the coffee already made, which was something I had been learning across the four months: that Casey rose in the deepest part of the night and made the coffee and came back to bed, and that he did not mention it or expect acknowledgment for it. It was simply what he did, the quiet form of his attentiveness at three in the morning when there was nobody to see it but the dark.
The Ebb Tide Series
Landfall is the second novel in the Ebb Tide Series, a Gulf Coast trilogy following Troy Hammersmith across two decades of love, concealment, and chosen family in the don't-ask-don't-tell era and after. Where Still Waters was the making of a hidden life, Landfall is its testing, the weather a made thing has to take once it exists in the world. Told in Troy's retrospective first-person voice. New to the series? Start with Still Waters.
- 1. Still Waters
- 2. Landfall
- 3. Slack Water
See the whole series on the Books page
Book details
- Author Cade Morrow
- Series Ebb Tide, Book 2
- Genre Southern literary fiction, LGBTQ+ fiction
- Setting Gulf Coast and the Deep South
- Length About 69,000 words, 11 chapters
If you like
Interior, restrained literary fiction that privileges the unsaid over plot, set in a vividly specific American place. Readers of André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name and Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You will recognize the slow atmosphere and the first-person reticence of a narrator who reveals himself only obliquely. Book 2 deepens the register from first love into the harder territory of keeping a love once it is built.
About the author
Cade Morrow writes Southern literary fiction about men navigating love, identity, and the long shadow of lives kept quiet. His work is set along the Gulf Coast and the Deep South, in south Mississippi, rural Alabama, and Mobile Bay, and his Ebb Tide trilogy follows two military officers across twenty years of a relationship the country would not allow them to name. Read more about Cade.
Come ashore with Landfall.
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