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The eleven stories in Nothing Like An Ocean confirm the promise of Jim Tomlinson's award-winning debut, Things Kept, Things Left Behind. Set in and around the fictional town of Spivey, Kentucky, the stories spotlight small-town lives that are thrown into quiet turmoil by unexpected events or outsiders: a man's broken-down car prompts a bittersweet hometown reunion; a husband is surprised to find that the idyllic spot where he courted his wife has been obliterated by mountaintop removal; a waitress watches in fascination as a regular customer blossoms as muse to an artist from Belarus.

Adept at juxtaposing light and dark elements, Tomlinson displays compassion for characters searching for moments of found grace and earned redemption. The title story, about a divorced man who receives an anonymous invitation to a church social for middle-aged singles, carries tragic undertones as the protagonist is continually reminded of his son's accidental death and the subsequent dissolution of his marriage.

With a strong sense of place and clear, poetic language, Tomlinson breathes new life into timeless stories, creating for the reader a world that is foreign and yet deeply familiar.

Jim Tomlinson is a retired engineer who began writing full-time in 1999. His first book, Things Kept, Things Left Behind, received the 2006 Iowa Short Fiction Award, from which a selection appeared in New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2008.

"Tomlinson knows the pressures of life in a small community, the love of land, the cost of loyalty to family, and the confines of geography. With a vast scope including wars in Vietnam and Iraq, car dealers and high school teachers, this book never wavers from its profound embrace of humanity."-Chris Offutt, author of Kentucky Straight

"With his flawless ear for speech and great compassion and wisdom regarding measures of the human heart, Tomlinson drops us right into lives and situations that mesmerize and stun each and every time. Another fine collection from this very gifted writer."-Jill McCorkle, author of Creatures of Habit: Stories

"Tomlinson's work is very heartening evidence of the health of that beloved but often slighted form: the short story."-Richard Bausch, author of Peace

"These are sophisticatedly written stories about unsophisticated people, case studies of relationships that are convincing enough to be real. Tomlinson is a masterful storyteller, original, convincing, resonant."-Richard Taylor, former poet laureate of Kentucky and author of Sue Mundy: A Novel of the Civil War

"Nothing Like an Ocean is a masterful work of regional fiction, but to label it such is perhaps to diminish the universal appeal of Tomlinsons themes, the finely skilled prose that brings them to life."-American Book Review

"Jim Tomlinson is a talented writer, brilliant and capable. In well-crafted pieces with masterful turns in the tales, Tomlinson writes the truth of rural Kentucky and gives it a place of dignity in literature."-Mary Popham, New Southerner