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.