Ocean Child: A Novel
Three sisters share a father who is a distant mystery, a shadow cast across their lives. As each navigates adulthood, confronting loss, love, independence, and longing, they discover truths about their father—and each other—that change everything.
Sometimes the families we build are stronger than the ones we are given.
Ocean Child is a novel about three half-sisters, raised oceans apart, who must fight the imprint of a broken father and forge their own definitions of belonging, resilience, and family.
With vivid prose and deeply felt characters, M. E. Flatow’s debut novel explores how an absent parent can shape identity, how sisterhood can both fracture and heal, and how facing the past is essential to forging a stronger future.
Explore themes of family, identity, and emotional resilience.
Meet relatable characters whose struggles and triumphs reflect real-world complexity.
Discover a story that offers hope, healing, and connection.
About Ocean Child
Ray Corning’s three daughters grew up as strangers, scattered across the world—until his long-buried secret surfaced.
In 2010 Sydney, twenty-year-old surfer Julia Corning receives an email that shatters everything she thought she knew about her family — and herself. Her father, a controlling presence she has long struggled to escape, has two other daughters she never knew existed. As Julia fights for independence, her half-sisters, Miriam, a London actress unraveling under grief, and Catrina, a driven California tech prodigy at risk of losing her integrity, are facing battles of their own.
Brought together by necessity more than blood, they must each confront the question: who do we become when the family we are born into fails us?
Meet the Ocean Children
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Julia
In Sydney, twenty-year-old Julia Corning spends her days surfing and dodging Ray’s rigid expectations.
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Miriam
In London, Miriam Worthington, a celebrated actress, feels trapped in a television role she’s outgrown, her mother’s sudden death shattering her foundation, pulling her toward self-sabotage.
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Catrina
Meanwhile, in Southern California, Catrina McDavid is laser-focused on her career, determined to escape the financial instability of her youth.
Themes
Ocean Child explores the resilience of women carving futures out of fractured beginnings. It is a novel about survival, identity, chosen family, and the ways we find belonging when the world we were born into lets us down.
