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An Orkney Hearth is the latest novel from author Sara Romera. Sara is a former senior cruise ship officer. She spent more than fifteen years at sea, working her way up from entry-level roles to senior officer across multiple vessels and cruise lines, leading guest experience and entertainment for thousands of guests at a time.
She has spent fifteen years learning how to need no one.
Nora Sterling is the Cruise Director of the Vesta. She runs a department of a hundred, remembers nine hundred guests by name, and can talk a shipful of frightened people through a mid-ocean helicopter evacuation without once raising her voice.
She has no address. She has never slept on a mattress that was not somebody else’s first. She has spent her entire adult life at sea and she has been perfectly, deliberately fine.
Then the ship takes on a new Music Director.
Erland Isbister is Orcadian, unhurried, and quietly immovable. He does not perform, he does not push, and he notices everything. He also reports directly to her, which puts him squarely on the wrong side of the company handbook and squarely in her path ten hours a day, months at a stretch.
On a ship, there is nowhere to put a thing like this.
Nora has spent her whole life being the person everybody relies on and nobody worries about. She has never once, in thirty-three years, said out loud that she wanted something.
She is about to find out what it costs her not to.
An Orkney Hearth is one of those lovely books that you read unhurridly in the bath with a glass of wine, or curled up on the sofa in front of the fire. It’s the type you start aiming to read just a couple of chapters but the next time you look up you have read the entire thing.
You really get a sense of life onoard a cruise ship and feel like you are part of the crew. Nora is such a wonderfully complex but highly relatable character you just really want her to get that happy ending.
If you love stories that fully immerse you in the setting, gentle slow burn and forbidden work place romances then this will tick all the boxex for you.
You can get a copy of An Orkney Hearth here!
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