There are two oceans, mom used to tell me. There is one that is blue-a clean, bright Disney World blue, which simply is the mirror of a clear sky above. But look at the ocean on a cloudy day, she would say, and here lies the green ocean-the true ocean, full of algae and kelp and slimy creatures, evil lurking in the shadows.

The One True Ocean is a searing "what happened?" novel driven by suspense and tension when a twenty-something artist returns to her abandoned childhood home and begins to dig into her past. In a search for answers to her aunt's suicide and her father's identity, Jenna discovers that her seaside house holds dark secrets that will unravel her family history and shatter the truth she has come to believe.

In this eloquent debut novel, Sarah Beth Martin mixes dark psychology and real emotion with breathless storytelling to explore the deep connections between past and present, love and loss, the dead and the living.

Sarah Beth Martin began her writing career with a story published in Mostly Maine: A Writer's Journal. Since then, she has been published in Pearl, West Wind Review, and Animus, among others, and ran the literary journal Foliage. Martin lives in Yarmouth, Maine, and is currently at work on her second novel.

?PART ONE
Aftermath -1

PART TWO
The Origins of Things -23

PART THREE
A More Horrible Death -57

PART FOUR
The Rift -83

PART FIVE
The Color of Water -111

PART SIX
The Thaw -139

PART SEVEN
Awakening -165

PART EIGHT
The Calm -203

PART NINE
The Living-229

PART TEN
A Fertile Green -255

PART ELEVEN
Buried Things -269

PART TWELVE
The Umbilical -281

PART THIRTEEN
Undertow -299

PART FOURTEEN
In the Wake of Green -317