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.
Notices
“Dizzyingly innovative and wildly ambitious, The Coast of Everything is also a true page-turner—immersive, prescient and moving. Guillermo Stitch is one of my favorite living writers, and all of his talents are on display in this astounding new novel.”
—Christopher Boucher, author of Big Giant Floating Head
“An immense achievement. The Coast of Everything is an ingenious series of nesting novels, combining the worlds of Dickens, sci-fi, detective noir and The Arabian Nights. It invites us to pull at the threads of narrative superstructure and ask who is really reading and telling us this addictive story.”
—Rónán Hession, author of Ghost Mountain and Leonard and Hungry Paul
“The Coast of Everything is a genre-shifting, interlocking and overlapping wondrous puzzle of a novel, a book which houses never-ending stories and a never-ending story, which spirals and multiplies and drives its reader through its 747 pages with death-defying nerve and a life-embracing drive. Its structure is not so much ‘boxes within boxes’ as ‘boxes hidden in subterranean tunnels beneath abyssal caverns which lead to labyrinthine corridors which open out into mysterious rooms which in turn contain more boxes.’ And it is, I think, the only book of such length which, once finished, immediately left me with the urge to go back to its first page and begin again.”
—C.D.Rose, author of Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea
“Guillermo Stitch escorts the reader through lush, Jamesian-paced prose that hums with the echoes of the Russians, the warmth of EM Forster, and the joie de vivre of James Joyce. This is a fabulous landscape: dreamy, concrete, beautifully and fully imagined, and peopled with vivid mavericks. The Coast of Everything is a timeless, extraordinary work.”
—Nuala O’Connor, author of NORA & Seaborne
“Structurally every bit as innovative and impressive as Ulysses. Stunning… absolutely stunning.”
David Collard, author of Multiple Joyce
“Stitch takes the reader deeper into a book than any author has ever done before … [exploring] the boundaries between when one story ends and the next one begins and how they overlap…. [The nested stories] are separate entities but at the same time they are one … more a collective than a collection…. I very much doubt you will be disappointed by the experience of this adventurous book.”
—Jason Denness, in The Gnome Appreciation Society
“The fact that there is a writer like Guillermo Stitch defiantly working at these depths when so much feels so shallow turns me around whenever I’m at the point of despair. It’s the only kind of antic disposition committed enough to pierce through. I’ve been lost in The Coast of Everything for months and I’m not sure I’ll ever get out or if I even want to.”
—Luke Kennard, author of The Book of Jonah
“Containing elements of detective noir and sci-fi, as well as literary allusions taking in everything The Arabian Nights to Dickens, this is definitely one for those who like their fiction in maximalist mode. Indeed, The Coast of Everything is as wildly innovative a novel as you could hope to read.”
—Hotpress (May 2026 print edition)
“The Coast of Everything is the sort of book that makes you feel simultaneously more intelligent and more illiterate…. Despite its intellectual density, the prose remains agile and pleasurable. Stitch can move effortlessly from gritty noir to Dickensian comedy to postmodern fragmentation without losing tonal control. His sentences are alive with literary memory but rarely paralysed by it. One feels the presence of Borges, Calvino, Pynchon, Barthelme, and Joyce, yet the voice remains distinctively Stitch’s: playful, melancholy, encyclopedic, and slightly feverish. He writes as though every idea reminds him irresistibly of six others…. Lesser metafiction delights in eventually revealing the trick. Stitch is after something stranger and more difficult. The Coast of Everything suggests that stories are not codes to be solved but habitats to be lived inside. The recurring concern is not meaning but continuation…. [O]ne of the most ambitious literary works in recent memory: a maximalist meditation on storytelling, identity, and survival that insists stories matter because life itself depends on them. Scheherazade told stories to her captor to survive another night. Stitch, one suspects, writes for much the same reason.”
—Reggie Chamberlain-King, in PopMatters
“Guillermo Stitch’s new novel The Coast of Everything hurls salvos of delicious sentences, voice, and prescient irony that hit the reader broadsides…. It is an outcry, a tour-de-force with wings, for the resurrection of intelligence and, yes, freedom of speech.”
—David Brizer, in Compulsive Reader
Guillermo Stitch, Executive Editor of Exacting Clam, is the author of The Coast of Everything and Lake of Urine. He lives in Spain.