Debut novelist Alicia Upano will discuss and sign her first book, Everything to the Sea, at Vroman’s Bookstore on Monday at 7 p.m., appearing in conversation with Tarra Stevenson, a Pasadena educator who has known the author since their teenage years in Hawaiʻi.
The novel, released July 14 by William Morrow/HarperCollins, follows two young lovers on the island of Hawaiʻi whose relationship is cut short when a tsunami strikes, and traces their separate paths over the years that follow. The Pasadena stop places a summer debut that has drawn national notice in front of local readers.
Upano was born and raised in Hawaiʻi and now lives on Oʻahu with her family, according to her author biography. Before the novel, she published short fiction in journals including The Massachusetts Review and The Southern Review. She has received the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, a Bread Loaf–Rona Jaffe Scholarship, and the Poets & Writers Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award for Hawaiʻi.
According to the publisher’s description, the story centers on Jane, home for a final summer before her senior year of college and saving for a future she plans to build on the mainland, and Kenji, a young man from Hilo. The book follows the couple across years and shorelines after disaster separates them. It carries the ISBN 9780063437937 and is published in the United States and Canada by William Morrow/HarperCollins and in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury.
The book was named to People’s Must-Read Books of Summer 2026 and to HONOLULU Magazine’s list of AANHPI titles to watch this year, according to the author’s website.
Stevenson, who will lead the conversation, is a Pasadena educator and literary theorist and the founder of the Girls’ School Book Club. She holds an MA in English and an MFA in creative writing, and she writes the literary newsletter Heavy Meta. In that newsletter, she previewed the Vroman’s event and described Upano as a longtime friend, noting that the two met as teenagers in a Hawaiʻi high school theater program roughly three decades ago.
The Pasadena appearance is one stop on a wider tour for the book. Upano is also scheduled for bookstore events elsewhere in the state in the weeks around the release, including a July 28 signing at Mrs. Dalloway’s in Berkeley and an appearance at Warwick’s in La Jolla.
Vroman’s, at 695 E. Colorado Blvd., lists the program as an adult event with a signing to follow. Information about the event is available from the store at 626-449-5320.
Everything to the Sea was released July 14. Under the store’s standard format, Upano will discuss the novel in conversation with Stevenson before signing copies for attendees.
