Habits of the Sea

by Shea Ernshaw ★★★☆☆

When she was twelve years old, Ellie Mills had a startling encounter. Alerted by a noise in the middle of the night, she rises from bed to investigate and notices a light just past the breakers rimming the rocky inlet of her small Nova Scotia community. She ventures out in her boat and comes across a small island that seems to have run aground on the rocks, topped by a weathered farmhouse. She ventures onto the shore, and there she meets a man who seems to be living in the house on the floating island.

After a brief, terse interaction with the man—no more than an hour or two—the island begins to dislodge from the rocks. The man ushers young Ellie back into her boat and she returns to the mainland. Upon her arrival, her family and the police are amazed and beside themselves. They all claim Ellie has been gone for a week, and they think she's fabricating her story about the man and the mysterious floating island.

Ellie eventually comes to learn of the mythical tales of Saltwell Island, and the man who allegedly inhabits it, Clay Lockhart. As legend has it, Clay Lockhart's wife died in childbirth, along with the twins she was carrying, and his grief broke his homestead off from the Scottish isle to which it was attached. The piece of land became a mythical floating island known as Saltwell, witnessed every few years by sailors and the like but never photographed or confirmed. As such, like Big Foot or Nessie, those sightings were mostly written off to the ramblings of attention-seekers and those with fanciful imaginations.

But Ellie knows what she experienced, and twenty years later, she still feels a gap in her life and a desire to prove to herself that she did not in fact imagine that childhood encounter. When there are widely publicized reports of a sighting of Saltwell, Ellie immediately heads from her home in Seattle to the Faroe Islands to investigate, leaving behind her job and her boyfriend (who has just proposed). This is her chance to fill that gaping hole that has bothered her for years.

And it turns out, she's not crazy. She finds the island, and she makes her way there, injuring herself in the process. Clay rescues her and nurses her back to health, but by the time she has recovered the island is once again adrift, and Ellie is trapped. Clay, meanwhile, is exactly as Ellie remembered him; despite twenty years having passed, he looks like he's barely aged.

Habits of the Sea explores this fork in the road of Ellie's life. Now that she's confirmed her sanity, she begins to regret the rashness of her decision. She left behind her aging grandmother, a solid job, and a good man who asked her to marry him (Ellie told him she needed time to think about it as opposed to immediately accepting). Like the island pulled her to it, now her old life begins pulling her back. Meanwhile, Clay Lockhart seems none-too-pleased to have her invading his solitary existence. But as the days and weeks mount with no sight of land, the tension between Clay and Ellie begins to thaw, and Ellie is increasingly pulled in two directions.

What follows is part love story and part survival story. Left alone on an abandoned island, it's no surprise that two warm-blooded adults start to find themselves drawn to each other. That being said, the bond between Ellie and Clay still felt exaggerated; other than a lack of options, this didn't feel like a natural connection. The survival side of the story had some curious components as well. Considering how long the island would remain at sea, the provisions required to survive seemed too conveniently available and replaceable. Despite all of that, I was generally entertained by the novel, even if Ellie's choices and internal conflict did not endear her to me.

I was a big fan of author Shea Ernshaw's A History of Wild Places, which was an interesting and smart thriller with some unexpected components. Habits of the Sea didn't quite hit the same mark for me, but it's a novel idea for a story and it made for an interesting read.

---

Quick Facts

• Title: Habits of the Sea

• Author: Shea Ernshaw

• Publisher: Atria Books

• Release Date: July 7, 2026

• Format: Ebook

• ISBN-13: 978-1668097786

• Pages: 304