Jim Lynch is the author of the prize-winning novels Border Songs and Truth Like the Sun, both of which were performed on stage. Lynch’s first novel, The Highest Tide, won the Pacific Northwest Bookseller Award, was performed on stage in Seattle and became an international bestseller after it was featured on England’s Richard and Judy television show. As The Seattle Times once remarked, Jim Lynch “observes like a journalist and writes like a poet.” Lynch has received national reporting honours and has served as a reporter for newspapers in Alaska, Virginia, Seattle, Spokane, Portland and Washington, D.C. He lives and sails in Olympia, Washington with his wife and daughter.

Before the Wind

In Before the Wind, Jim Lynch gives us a grand and idiosyncratic family saga with the grace and humour of a talented storyteller. Joshua Johannssen has spent all of his life surrounded by sailboats. His grandfather designed them, his father built and raced them, his Einstein-obsessed mother knows why and how they work (or not). Suddenly thirty-one, Josh is pained and confused by whatever went wrong with his volatile family. His parents are barely speaking, his mystified grandfather is drinking harder, and he himself—despite an endless and comic flurry of online dates—hasn’t even come close to finding a girlfriend. When the seafaring Johannssens unexpectedly find themselves reunited on a classic vessel their family built decades ago, past and present collide into heart-shattering revelations.