"Love hurts, power corrupts, and money makes the world go round, but it takes a first-rate artist to say something new and final about all three. In An Ocean Without A Shore, Scott Spencer proves just that. A fierce observer with the soul of a romantic, he knows what matters most: that our folly, put on display, should wreck, ravish, engulf us." — Joshua Ferris
“In elegantly turned phrases and brilliantly nuanced dialogue, Scott Spencer has populated ‘An Ocean without a Shore’ with fully formed, complex, deeply sympathetic characters, each of whom shines a dazzling light on what men and women will do in the name of love.” — Francine Prose
"An Ocean Without a Shore is a classic Scott Spencer novel: as always, he writes masterfully on the pain of longing and traces, with exacting detail, the hidden forces that animate his character's lives. Spencer is one of my very favorite writers, and this is a wonderful book." — Emma Cline
"Spencer’s writing is always a pleasure." — Kirkus Reviews
"If you entertain any doubts about love’s capacity to lacerate us, to transfigure us, to redeem us even as it crushes us, Scott Spencer’s An Ocean Without a Shore will put those doubts to rest. It’s a harrowing, insidiously gorgeous, entirely remarkable novel."
— Michael Cunningham
"Brutal, romantic and totally absorbing, An Ocean Without a Shore is about people you thought you knew, people who, it turns out, you didn't know at all. Spencer is masterful at describing the way side-lined passion can grow huge, anguished and absolutely essential." — Mary Gaitskill
"Spencer has a gift for depicting the ecstasies and torments of romantic love with crisp detail and deliberate restraint, and it is this quality, together with Kip’s haunted narrative voice, that give this tale special resonance." — Booklist