The Coast of Everything by Irish writer Guillermo Stitch publishes today June 16th with Sagging Meniscus Press. It is described as ‘a decade in the making, the much anticipated follow-up to Guillermo Stitch’s debut novel, Lake of Urine.’ Stitch is the executive editor of Exacting Clam, the quarterly sister publication of Sagging Meniscus.
Matryoshka dolls and James Joyce were the two thoughts that entered my head as I got deeper and deeper into this very alternative novel, one that, I must admit, was a little beyond my comfort zone. The Coast of Everything is an extraordinary piece of work wrapped around a series of nesting stories. Incorporating multiple genres, with even a cameo from Charles Dickens in one story, Stitch is a writer not afraid to take risks, jumping from the whimsical to the chaotic. Quirky, surreal, fanciful, with a definite leaning toward the avant-garde, The Coast of Everything is a very unique reading experience, an immense work of creativity and imagination, a novel that demands more from the reader.
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What is it about?
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 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 to persist.
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What people are saying:
“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
“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
“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
[ Thank you to Guillermo Stitch & Sagging Meniscus for a copy of The Coast of Everything in exchange for my honest review ]
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Who is Guillermo Stitch?
Guillermo Stitch is the author of ‘Lake of Urine’, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and, according to the same newspaper, one of the 22 funniest novels since Catch-22. He is executive editor of Exacting Clam. He lives in Spain
