An Orkney Hearth - Love and Other Ports Book one by Sara Romera #Review

 An Orkney Hearth – Love and Other Ports Book One 

She has spent fifteen years learning how to need no one.

Nora Sterling is the Cruise Director of the Vesta. She runs a department of a hundred, remembers nine hundred guests by name, and can talk a shipful of frightened people through a mid-ocean helicopter evacuation without once raising her voice. 

She has no address. She has never slept on a mattress that was not somebody else's first. She has spent her entire adult life at sea and she has been perfectly, deliberately fine. 

Then the ship takes on a new Music Director.

Erland Isbister is Orcadian, unhurried, and quietly immovable. He does not perform, he does not push, and he notices everything. He also reports directly to her, which puts him squarely on the wrong side of the company handbook and squarely in her path ten hours a day, months at a stretch. 

On a ship, there is nowhere to put a thing like this. 

Nora has spent her whole life being the person everybody relies on and nobody worries about. She has never once, in thirty-three years, said out loud that she wanted something. 

She is about to find out what it costs her not to.

An Orkney Hearth is a slow-burn, closed-door cruise ship romance set aboard a luxury liner and on the windswept islands of northern Scotland. Forbidden workplace romance, forced proximity, found

family, and an unhurried hero who says almost nothing and means all of it. No explicit content. Guaranteed happily ever after. 

Book One of Love and Other Ports, for readers of Jenny Colgan and Susanna Kearsley.

My Thoughts

Sara is a complicated central character who captures your empathy from early on. She has spent all her working life on cruise ships and childhood days before that. She has put up barriers against getting involved with anyone and concentrated on her career and life on board. Erland is quite different. He has a life back on the Orkneys where he has people who have known him all his life. He is determined to return there to establish a home and a future away from the transitory life on the cruise ships.

     I loved the descriptions of life at sea and following the development of Sara and Erland's friendship. There is a great contrast with the life on the Orkneys and you are rooting for both Sara and Erland, hoping they can agree on a future together. You sense that the author is writing from her experience of observing life on board which gives the story authenticity.

In short: new starts

About the Author

Sara Romera is a writer and former senior cruise ship officer. She spent more than fifteen years at sea, working her way up from entry-level roles to senior officer across multiple vessels and cruise lines, leading guest experience and entertainment for thousands of guests at a time.

 

She writes about the world behind the voyage. Inside the Floating City began as a survival guide she wrote for new crew and grew into a portrait of life aboard a modern cruise ship. The Discerning Voyager is a senior officer's guide to choosing a cruise well. The Lantern of the Sea, a picture book for children, began with the families ashore when a parent goes to sea, but speaks to anyone who has ever missed someone: partners kept apart by distance, children waiting for someone to come home, anyone holding the light while a person they love is away.

 

Her romance series, Love and Other Ports, is set in the world she spent her career inside: shipboard lives, where people meet on the move and every arrival already carries its departure. The stories turn on what that closeness leaves behind, and on whether something formed at sea can hold once the ship has sailed on.

 

She also writes the monthly Ask the Officer column for Euro Weekly News, and is the founder of Sea Lantern Studio, her independent literary imprint.

 

She lives in Spain, near the sea.

You can follow Sara here: website  |  Instagram  |  You tube

Book links :  Purchase links

Thanks to Sara Romera, Sea Lantern Press and Rachel of Rachel's Random Resources for a copy of the book and a place on the event.

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