Hallam returns from prison to his childhood home – a dilapidated house on the sea-battered north Cornish coast, a place where land and water embrace in perennial, furious exchange, where he ekes out a living repairing nets, the spectral presence of wreckers and smugglers riding the south-westerly. It is a home built on a tapestry of sound: a dozen different winds, waves that growl and pummel, the rark of gulls. A place to heal, to forget.
 
But when a young Romanian woman strides fully-clothed into the sea one evening, their interlocked fates serve only to marshal all the brutality of Hallam’s past life.
 
EVERY SEVENTH WAVE is a literary tale of the fates we tether ourselves to, how seemingly benign encounters can provoke both hope and devastation.
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                                        ~

‘True to the realities of its Cornish location and the torque of its characters' histories, this is a story of contemporary urgency - vividly written, morally complex, unforgettably moving’
Graham Mort
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‘A stunning novel of precarious lives lived on the fringes, and suffusing the whole thing, the sea's implacable presence. I
​found it touching, moving and disturbing in equal measure’
Wyl Menmuir
 
‘Compelling, intense, bracing and raw as the waves themselves’
Miriam Darlington
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​‘The writing is like old magic, working its way inside.
​Beautiful and searing’
Ríona Judge McCormack

‘The novel grips from the first page with a sense of
lurking danger and ​characters who have
within them the sea's silent depths’
Linda Cracknell 

​‘Tom Vowler writes with attentiveness and empathy,
crafting a moving and compelling story of love,
loss and the possibility of redemption’
Ben Smith