Above Us The Sea — Ania Card

‘Maybe when we looked away from it, it could only be for a fragmented moment. Maybe our gaze always returned, our eyes always finding the sea.’

It’s after a night in Cardiff’s loudest gay bar that Toni first lays eyes on Gav, a retired Welsh boxer, and his boyfriend Karol, an aspiring Polish photographer. The trio soon fall into an intimate, ambiguous love triangle.

After a tragic event at a beach in Swansea, the trio are ripped apart, and Toni escapes to London, becoming caught between a convenient, loveless relationship and an illicit, lustful affair. Lost halfway between the British future she has always wanted, and the Eastern European past she has been running from, Toni can only wonder where and with whom she really belongs.Above Us the Sea is an ode to the tangled remains of lost loves and the imprints left by grieving souls, yearning for connection. This is a story of aching and emerging, intimacy and distance, set against an increasingly hostile landscape.

Ania Card grew up in south-eastern Poland before moving to the UK. She lived in Cardiff and London before moving to Brighton, where she now lives with her husband and cat. She studied film theory at King’s College London and worked in film production before returning to writing. Above Us the Sea is her first novel.