title: Sea Lovers: Selected Stories
author: Valerie Martin
description: "Martins prose is lucid, and she avoids stylistic pyrotechnics. Her primary aim is to allow her characters their contradictory feelings, giving them room to breathe ... Martins complex and wonderful stories, with their careful rendering and sober insights, offer their own kind of relief for the reader: This book is a long, cool drink of water."<br /><b><i>New York Times Book Review</i></b><br /><br />"Valerie Martin is a consummate stylist. A cool, spare writer who can make the fantastic utterly, often horribly believable ... In her latest collection of 12 short stories that gift is on full display. A mermaid washes ashore, with murderous intent. A magical suitor displays bad behavior, as do all sorts of more realistic lovers and spouses, artists and writers. Most often, the stories resolve with a twistsome tragic, some simply oddthat causes them to linger in the readers mind: cautionary tales about the mysteries of life."<br /><b><i>Boston Globe</i></b><br /><br />"Whether theyre self-absorbed painters, deserted women, or even centaurs, Martins characters are torn between the facades they don and the baser, more animalistic impulsesthe needs for power, attention, and revengethat animate them ... an insightful look into the evolution of Martins writing and her talent for depicting our darker natures. Varied, engaging, and often shocking."<br /><b><i>Kirkus Reviews, </i>starred review<br /><br /></b>"This collection is rife with the unspoken cracks between people, and leaves a haunting, lingering impression."<br /><b><i>Publishers Weekly</i></b>
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  The Seacroft
  
  A love story
  
  Paines Creek Beach, Book 2
  
  By Aaron Paul Lazar
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The Seacroft: a love story by Aaron Paul Lazar
  
  This is a work of fiction. All concepts, characters and events portrayed in
  this book are fiction and any resemblance to real people or events is purely
  coincidental.
  
  Copyright © 2015 by Aaron Paul Lazar.
  
  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
  retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means electronic,
  mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except brief extracts for
  the purpose of review, without the permission of the publisher and copyright
  owner.
  
  First Edition, August, 2015
  
  Cover Art by Kellie Dennis at Book Cover by Design
  
  [www.bookcoverbydesign.co.uk](http://www.bookcoverbydesign.co.uk)
  
  Published in the United States of America.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Dedication
  
  To my dear mother, who said she wasn’t shocked by my racy love stories,
  because, “I was married to a French lover!” That always m