To find the center, begin at the edge . . . A daughter's devotion parts her from her father. A dutiful soldier sentences his daughter to a loveless exile and her mother to madness. With her last breath a dying woman exhales the whole world. A young girl with a broken body holds it up. Their nested stories bleed into one another: tributaries in search of a common sea; parched souls in search of an oasis; ink racing through blotting paper. A book with no ending and endless beginnings, The Coast of Everything — the long-awaited second novel from the author of Lake of Urine — is an astonishing masterpiece, epic, unfurling, baffling and beguiling. A gumshoe noir, a space opera; a multiverse melodrama, an adventure; a leap of faith, a call to prayer and a call to arms. It is a notification of our first duty wherever our humanity is threatened: to persist. Includes two free recipes.