Literary Fiction·2026
Stars Over Redfish Island
With his faithful dog, Jake, beside him and the wide waters of Galveston Bay before him, Caleb sets sail into one unforgettable summer. What begins as a boyhood adventure becomes a journey of courage, family, and discovery that will change the course of his life forever.
"Stars Over Redfish Island" is for everyone who remembers the summer when the world seemed endless, childhood began to slip away, and growing up truly began.
Set along the tidal marshes, open bays, and salt-scoured shores of the Texas Gulf Coast, the novel unfolds in a landscape most Americans have never seen — a world of shrimp boats and weathered piers, of redfish running in shallow flats, of summer storms rolling in off the Gulf and skies so wide they seem to hold everything a boy could ever want or fear. It is a place where the water teaches patience, where the land and sea are never quite separate, and where a single summer can reshape a life.
Co-authored by John Morgan and Linda Ward, the story draws on Morgan's own childhood in Seabrook, Texas — a small coastal community on the western shore of Galveston Bay where life once moved at the pace of the tides. The novel is rooted in the specific textures of that world: the smell of salt air and diesel, the sound of rigging in the wind, the particular quality of light on open water at dusk. These are not invented details. They are remembered ones.
At its heart, Stars Over Redfish Island is a coming-of-age story about the threshold between boyhood and something harder and more complicated. Caleb's summer on the water forces him to reckon with questions of loyalty, loss, and what it means to belong to a place — and to leave it. The novel asks what we carry forward from the landscapes that shaped us, and what we leave behind when we grow up.
Literary fiction in the tradition of place-driven American writing — precise, unhurried, and deeply attentive to the natural world. Readers who love the coastal fiction of Larry Brown, Ron Rash, or Tim Gautreaux will find familiar ground here: a story told close to the earth, with characters who are inseparable from the land and water they inhabit.