BLAST, BLITZ, PROMOS, REVEALS, & TOURS . . . : SPOTLIGHT w/EXCERPT - HISTORICAL - OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA by Leah Angstman

Out Front the Following Sea
by Leah Angstman
Publication Date: January 11th, 2022
Regal House Publishing
Hardcover, Paperback, eBook, Audiobook; 334 pages
Genre: Historical / Literary / Epic

**Shortlisted for the Chaucer Book Award**

OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA is a historical epic of one woman’s survival in a time when the wilderness is still wild, heresy is publicly punishable, and being independent is worse than scorned—it is a death sentence.

At the onset of King William’s War between French and English settlers in 1689 New England, Ruth Miner is accused of witchcraft for the murder of her parents and must flee the brutality of her town. She stows away on the ship of the only other person who knows her innocence: an audacious sailor—Owen—bound to her by years of attraction, friendship, and shared secrets. But when Owen’s French ancestry finds him at odds with a violent English commander, the turmoil becomes life-or-death for the sailor, the headstrong Ruth, and the cast of Quakers, Pequot Indians, soldiers, highwaymen, and townsfolk dragged into the fray. Now Ruth must choose between sending Owen to the gallows or keeping her own neck from the noose.

Steeped in historical events and culminating in a little-known war on pre-American soil, OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA is a story of early feminism, misogyny, arbitrary rulings, persecution, and the treatment of outcasts, with parallels still mirrored and echoed in today’s society. The debut novel will appeal to readers of Paulette Jiles, Alexander Chee, Hilary Mantel, James Clavell, Bernard Cornwell, TaraShea Nesbit, Geraldine Brooks, Stephanie Dray, Patrick O’Brian, and E. L. Doctorow.

Regal House Print | Amazon Kindle

EXCERPT

The sound of sardonic, slow applause came from behind her, and Ruth turned, cupping her palm over her eyes, to confront her taunting audience. She blinked, then blinked again. The windmill chopped the salty air and made a repeated click-creak where it hooked on a catch with each rotation. Silhouetted against it, the buildings rose like a line of jagged mountain peaks, their matching A-slant roofs like fangs against the sky. And there, a sailor, clad in a cap-sleeved, bluish-russet jacket with brass buttons in a line down the front; thigh-high, beaten-leather boots pulled taut over hose up to cottonade breeches; baggy ivory sleeves rolled into cuffs across worked upper arms; and a billed woolen cap stretched over black hair that hung shaggily around his ears and neck. He was still clapping. Ruth blinked again, then threw her eyes toward the harbor, beyond the windmill. There she saw the freight fluyt Primrose anchored outside the eastern dock. The great square-rig was never docked at Shrewsbury so late in the season. So, he wasn’t an apparition. The sailor’s attention flickered between her kneeling in the mud and his ship’s shallow bateau unloading at the dock, and Ruth’s eyes collapsed to quick, thin lines.

“Thank you for the help,” she said.

“Didn’t appear you needed any. You scrap like a sailor.” His smile was brash, genuine. “I had this niggling suspicion you’d light to that stick before the fat man could.” He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his breeches. “Right, per usual.”

She grunted and tossed aside the stick.

“A grunt is all you got for me? Hello to you, too. What are you doing out of your cage?”

“Scavenging.” The cold dampness clung to her stockinged foot, and she rutted around in the mud like a farm animal, hoping to find her sunken shoe. She shook the remaining tremble out of her fingers as she laced them through the muck.

He watched her steel herself. The corner of his lip twitched. “You’re unscathed, though, aye? Say you’re not, and I’ll stock-iron the brigand to Antigua on the next breeze.”

She gave up on the boot and stood, flipping mud from her dress. “Unscathed.” The throbbing of her knuckles reminded her she was a terrible liar.

“A jaunt, then?” He removed his cap and took an unnecessarily long bow, lifting her muddy boot from the marsh on his way back up. “To the dock. I’ve items.”

Scowling, she took the boot. A glance inside didn’t promise comfort, and she shook the miserable thing upside down. Mud oozed out onto her dress. She frowned toward the harbor’s small incoming boats only a short distance away, dwarfed by the mighty Primrose, then back to town equidistant behind her, then down at the mud caked on her arms and along her hemline. “Like this?”

“Like what? Something different about you, mon petite amour?” he said with charm only a licentious Frenchman could exude. “I’ll feign for modesty that all the mud covers what you think you’re hiding. Consider this: Widower Karelszoon might have been chasing you for another reason entirely.”

“God’s teeth.”

“I swear you was a scrawny mutt last I saw you.”

“God’s teeth,” she muttered again.

They reached the harbor, and he guided her toward the flatboat, where he withdrew a bundle, looked both ways, and slung it over his back. He tried not to think of it as reparations, but he knew they’d get to that later. The pilings stretched out into the Atlantic at the end of a long dock that flooded over with each wave. Fog moved in and gradually turned the land into fuzzy, gray felt. Grazing among offloaded firkins and kilderkins, he kicked the staves and pretended preoccupation, but his attention rested on the young woman, dressed in shades of murrey and lace and mud, shoulders curved away from the mirth of the sun, too old for her time. Her hair draped in auburn rivulets, not pretty, not unpretty, about her angled features. Wild. She looked feral and unbound. Her slender sixteen-year-old frame was adorned in colors too dark to be worn so soon before winter, as if in mourning or expecting to usher in the cold with her very presence. No other townswoman would have been caught entering the busy marketplace or harbor without her hair drawn beneath a coif, but convention escaped Ruth, and she, it. From the corner of his eye, he saw a deserter running inland, to the south, dodging behind the windmill, but he thought: Let him go, and couldn’t break his gaze from Ruth. He watched her, just standing, stark and cold and breathing, shivering somewhat. Hair down, dress muddy. What a creature to reckon with. He would, someday. Not today.

Praise

“An absorbing, painstakingly researched read that, like the sea itself, mirrors the beauty, cruelty, enormity, baseness, and wonder of human nature. It is chilling that Angstman’s debut novel set in seventeenth-century New England captures the horrors that continue to plague contemporary America, particularly with regard to imperialism and patriarchy. It is heart-swelling that, in these pages and in life, the best of humankind resists and endures. I’ll remember this book as a historical tale woven with wry humor, striking detail, lush prose, daring characters, and a belief in glorious possibilities.”

—Ethel Rohan, author of IN THE EVENT OF CONTACT and THE WEIGHT OF HIM

“Rich in deeply researched detail, and peopled by complex characters, OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA is a fascinating story that is bound to entrance readers of historical fiction.”

—Kathleen Grissom, author of THE KITCHEN HOUSE and GLORY OVER EVERYTHING

“From the squalor, prejudice, and violence of seventeenth-century America, Leah Angstman has summoned to life the most extraordinary young woman. Ruth Miner insists on surviving, building a life, and being true to her odd independent self, despite the whole world seeing her as worthless filth. Angstman creates a hypnotically real and brutal world and then manages to infuse it with humor and beauty and a moving tale of love. The reader will follow Ruth Miner anywhere, and be the richer for it.”

—Heather O’Neill, author of WHEN WE LOSE OUR HEADS

“With OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA, Leah Angstman reveals herself as a brave new voice in historical fiction. With staggering authenticity, Angstman gives us a story of America before it was America—an era rife with witch hunts and colonial intrigue and New World battles all but forgotten in our history books and popular culture. This is historical fiction that speaks to the present, recalling the bold spirits and cultural upheavals of a nation yet to be born.”

—Taylor Brown, author of PRIDE OF EDEN, GODS OF HOWL MOUNTAIN, and THE RIVER OF KINGS

“Steeped in lush prose, authentic period detail, and edge-of-your-seat action, OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA is a rollicking good read. Leah Angstman keeps the story moving at a breathtaking pace, and she knows more 17th-century seafaring language and items of everyday use than you can shake a stick at. The result is a compelling work of romance, adventure, and historical illumination that pulls the reader straight in.”

—Rilla Askew, author of FIRE IN BEULAH, THE MERCY SEAT, and KIND OF KIN

“Lapidary in its research and lively in its voice, OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA by Leah Angstman is a rollicking story, racing along with wind in its sails. Though her tale unfolds hundreds of years in America’s past, Ruth Miner is the kind of high-spirited heroine whose high adventures haul you in and hold you fast.”

—Kathleen Rooney, author of LILLIAN BOXFISH TAKES A WALK and CHER AMI AND MAJOR WHITTLESEY

“Leah Angstman has written the historical novel that I didn’t know I needed to read. OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA is set in an oft-forgotten time in the brutal wilds of pre-America that is so vividly and authentically drawn, with characters that are so alive and relevant, and a narrative so masterfully paced and plotted, that Angstman has performed the miracle of layering the tumultuous past over our troubled present to gift us a sparkling new reality.”

—Kevin Catalano, author of WHERE THE SUN SHINES OUT and DELETED SCENES AND OTHER STORIES

“OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA is a fascinating book, the kind of historical novel that evokes its time and place so vividly that the effect is just shy of hallucinogenic. I enjoyed it immensely.”

—Scott Phillips, author of THE ICE HARVEST, THE WALKAWAY, COTTONWOOD, and HOP ALLEY

“OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA is a meticulously researched novel that mixes history, love story, and suspense. Watching Angstman’s willful protagonist, Ruth Miner, openly challenge the brutal world of 17th-century New England, with its limiting ideas about gender, race, and science, was a delight.”

—Aline Ohanesian, author of ORHAN’S INHERITANCE

“Leah Angstman is a gifted storyteller with a poet’s sense of both beauty and darkness, and her stunning historical novel, OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA, establishes her as one of the most exciting young novelists in the country. Angstman plunges the reader into a brilliantly realized historical milieu peopled by characters real enough to touch. And in Ruth Miner, we are introduced to one of the most compelling protagonists in contemporary literature, a penetratingly intelligent, headstrong woman who is trying to survive on her wits alone in a Colonial America that you won’t find in the history books. A compulsive, vivid read that will change the way you look at the origins of our country, Leah Angstman’s OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA announces the arrival of a preternatural talent.”

—Ashley Shelby, author of MURI and SOUTH POLE STATION

“Rich, lyrical, and atmospheric, with a poet’s hand and a historian’s attention to detail. In OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA, Leah Angstman creates an immersive world for readers to get lost in and a fascinating story to propel them through it. A thoroughly engaging and compelling tale.”

—Steph Post, author of HOLDING SMOKE, MIRACULUM, and WALK IN THE FIRE

“It’s a rare story that makes you thankful for having read and experienced it. It’s rarer still for a story to evoke so wholly, so powerfully, another place and time as to make you thankful for the gifts that exist around you, which you take for granted. OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA is a book rich with misery, yet its characters are indefatigable; they yearn, despite their troubles, for victories personal and societal. Leah Angstman’s eye is keen, and her ability to transport you into America’s beginnings is powerful. With the raw ingredients of history, she creates a story both dashing and pensive, robust yet believable. From an unforgiving time, Angstman draws out a tale of all things inhuman, but one that reminds us of that which is best in all of us.”

—Eric Shonkwiler, author of ABOVE ALL MEN and 8TH STREET POWER AND LIGHT

"A challenging, exquisitely researched, epic, and stunning work of historical fiction that we don’t expect but definitely need, OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA magnificently captures the color of its time and settings. Angstman is an old soul who writes with the same flair that Hawthorne displayed in The Scarlet Letter and Jack London in The Sea-Wolf. She paints a past America without concealing its flaws, creating a lucid, masterfully crafted narrative and a fascinating fusion of history, intrigue, adventure, action, and romance that will immediately pull you in from the very first page. Angstman is a powerful writer, showing us bold imagery, nail-biting conflicts, and history that comes alive in the paragraphs, including banned languages and interesting dialects. You may forget you’re reading a book and feel like you’re living with the characters. The pace is perfect, and the action is enough to make you hold your breath.”

—Readers’ Favorite (five-starred review)

“A sweeping tale of intrigue, romance, and feminist power amidst the tumult of colonial North America. …Historical fiction, romance, and action-lovers alike will find something to enjoy in OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA. Keeping readers on their toes with ever-changing scenery and vibrant characters, Leah Angstman has recreated British Colonial America with a modern twist… [Her] story will beguile and compel readers, leaving them waiting for Angstman’s next book.”

—Independent Book Review

“This book moved me in ways that I didn’t expect. …The deeply researched and historically authentic world is vivid and immersive, and it captivated me from the first pages.”

—One Book More

“Ruth is an unforgettable strong woman with the independence of Kya Clark from Where the Crawdads Sing and the fortitude of Demelza from the Poldark series. I wanted to know whether Ruth survived and, if so, how she conquered the challenges she faced as an orphaned young woman in a harsh, patriarchal environment...Angstman uses a broad vocabulary, brutal descriptions, and colloquialisms (i.e. God’s teeth!) to immerse you in the time period [and] the characters were phenomenal. I recommend this book for anyone who loves historical fiction or stories about strong women.”

—Book Picks and Pics

Author Info

Leah Angstman is a historian and transplanted Michigander living in Boulder. OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA, her debut novel of King William’s War in 17th-century New England, is forthcoming from Regal House in January 2022. Her writing has been a finalist for the Saluda River Prize, Cowles Book Prize, Able Muse Book Award, Bevel Summers Fiction Prize, and Chaucer Book Award, and has appeared in Publishers Weekly, L.A. Review of Books, Nashville Review, Slice, and elsewhere. She serves as editor-in-chief for Alternating Current and The Coil magazine and copyeditor for Underscore News, which has included editing partnerships with ProPublica. She is an appointed vice chair of a Colorado historical commission and liaison to a Colorado historic preservation committee.

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