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
“This is a long and layered book that would doubtless benefit from a reread. Its clever construction helps retain interest whilst avoiding overcomplication. There are slower sections but they too have a part to play in building understanding and, eventually, appreciation of what the author is doing. I harbour no conceits that I fully understood Stitch’s storytelling aims, particularly around the final ending. Nevertheless, I consider what he did worked, providing much to ponder. This is literature to challenge and entertain.”
—Jackie Law, in neverimitate
“Matryoshka dolls and James Joyce were the two thoughts that entered my head as I got deeper and deeper into this very alternative novel…. 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.”
“The Coast of Everything is an intriguing unusual work of magical realism that muses on storytelling itself…. The plot’s freewheeling, nested approach, in which each distinctive part is told in a different style, is packed with momentum…. Here, stories for connoisseurs accumulate, with the manner of their telling becoming the book’s main feature.”
—Karen Rigby, in Foreword Reviews
“[O]ne of the considerable merits of The Coast of Everything is that it leaves you pondering not only the book in question but the workings of literature in general. Formally speaking, it relies on a strategy of nested stories like Russian dolls, but having said as much, the novel’s chief interest doesn’t reside in its narrative athleticism. It engages on many other levels.
“For instance, The Coast embodies a riposte against some of the didactic excesses of identity politics. In recent decades, many writers have asserted—rightly so—personal and community prerogatives to tell stories that were previously excluded from the canon. But at the same time, some writers—more debatably—have questioned the access of other authors to their imagined worlds. In her excellent essay, ‘Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction,’ Zadie Smith pinpoints a problem: ‘The old—and never especially helpful—adage write what you know has morphed into something more like a threat: Stay in your lane…. Embarrassed by the novel … many have moved swiftly on to what they perceive to be safer ground….’
“Stitch is not embarrassed by the novel. [The Coast of Everything] is a polyphonic performance, reaching beyond the particular interest of individual characters or groups, to explore the nature of narrative itself….
“Working on such an enormous canvas will inevitably run counter to the expectations of readers who, in our digital era of reduced attention spans, assume that the novel should follow suit…. The Coast of Everything rejects such circumscribed views. Though long and complicated, it remains accessible and reader-friendly, perhaps precisely because it feels unpoliced…. This is a remarkable novel by a writer who does not play safe.”
—Charles Holdefer, in Dactyl Review
“The Coast of Everything is told by Clara, a girl travelling up a mountain in a litter carried by two young friends to see what a mysterious local entrepreneur has built. The setting is reminiscent of Stitch’s first novel, Lake of Urine, a dark fairytale in which the author honed a strange, bracing wit that is balanced in The Coast of Everything with a more poetic impulse…. With its Russian doll structure, the logic of The Coast of Everything is of narrators narrating narrators narrating; it is the unreliable storyteller turned up to the max. The novel therefore requires patience and attention, some of which is tested … but is mostly rewarded, not least at the sentence level (Stitch is wonderful on colours and shades)…. [The] ambitious, provocative nature of a book happily out of step with the plain-style trend of contemporary fiction is refreshing.”
—W.J. Davies, in 3:AM Magazine
“This sprawling novel is variously dizzying, maddening, and meandering, which adds to the charm of its four interlocking tales…. ‘The Tale of the Isle of Truth’ focuses on a group of colonists who are analyzing forbidden works for a shadowy collective, the Magistracy, whose Kafkaesque edicts will feel all too familiar in a world battling antidemocratic insurgency. So will the yearnings of archivist Arenaceous Nell and his daughter, Lil, for a higher purpose beyond the busy work that still remains for them after the island closes as a surveillance station. Readers will be drawn to how their natural hunger for freedom chafes against the constraints imposed by the relentlessly creepy Stationmaster Jasper Fafl…. Stitch’s playful storytelling tricks won’t move readers who desire brevity as an end in itself. But for those who desire an antidote to our current blink-it-and-miss-it culture, this novel may well occupy a point of pride on their bedside tables. A sprawling but playful and black-humored sophomore effort that upends standard storytelling tropes.”
“Great writers constantly swim against the tide. There’s great risk in leaving the safety of the coastline, the comfort of breaths unencumbered by sea spray, the warmth of the sunlight on skin. In between strokes, they look over their shoulder and see the shoreline get smaller and smaller, but once they reach a certain point they stop, and they float, and they realize they can see everything. From here, the coast no longer looks small. It looks complete…. In The Coast of Everything, stories are told to move people forward, to challenge notions of what stories even are, to fight against the proverbial dying of the light…. In one particular passage, a man presses an ink nib onto a sheet of paper and watches the ink spread into random patterns as it soaks into the fibrous paper. ‘To be ink is to be what is,’ he tells us. ‘To be paper is to be what is not yet, or what is not yet known.’ It is this unknown that compels us to swim against the tide.”
—Jeff Chon, in Orange Country Review of Books
Guillermo Stitch, Executive Editor of Exacting Clam, is the author of The Coast of Everything and Lake of Urine. He lives in Spain.