Author

Rosalind Searle

Author of the upcoming romantic fantasy novel The Luszien Heir

A waterfall pouring down steep, forested fjord walls into dark open water

About the author

Rosalind Searle is the author of the upcoming adult romantic fantasy novel The Luszien Heir, the first book of a planned trilogy.

Rosalind graduated from UC Berkeley with a Bachelor’s degree in environmental earth science in 2021 and has quietly nurtured a love for reading and creative writing since she was a young girl— more specifically, since her parents first read her The Hobbit as a bedtime story at age four. Inspired by her late grandmother’s stories captaining and living aboard her own small sailboat for 20 years, she set out to write a story that would honor the mermaids in her own life. The youngest of five children, her mother was raised on her grandmother’s sailboat, which called Lahaina home but made many ocean crossings and journeys around the South Pacific. While Sera’s journey is not quite the same, it certainly pulls elements from the stories Rosalind has heard since she was a child and captures the curiosity and appreciation of the ocean that she’s harbored her whole life.

After a surf trip to New Zealand with her partner, she finally began to write the novel she had been mulling over in her mind for years while working full-time as an environmental consultant, drafting environmental regulatory reports and conducting environmental review of renewable energy projects across California. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Black-and-white photo of a woman with long wet hair swimming among rough waves

Aerial view of a hidden beach in a cove ringed by jagged limestone cliffs

Want more? Give a listen to the music that inspired the story. Spotify

The Luszien Heir

Book One of a Planned Trilogy Coming soon

Sera is heir to a mer kingdom under siege, now walking on borrowed legs that grow heavier with each day ashore. For a century and a half, the Cernadine Empire has tightened its grip on the Luszien Sea, hungry for dominance over its trade routes and extraction of vulcarus, a mineral unique to the Luszien’s deep vents and catastrophic to the ocean if torn from it irresponsibly. For nearly two decades, mer have been inexplicably disappearing at the hands of the empire. On land, they are barred from every shore but the Northern Islands, their last foothold above the waterline, and the free islands of the Midlands. When Eli, Sera’s closest friend and a trusted member of her court, vanishes, Sera refuses to wait for a rescue that will never come.

Disguised as a human sea reader, one of the rare few with a trace of mer blood, she secures passage on a pirate ship posing as a merchant vessel. Bound for Ile Nerine, the imperial stronghold where she believes Eli is being held, Sera embarks on a voyage through the treacherous Moruvel Passage, a quest spanning islands of varying landscapes where friends, and more often foe, are found around each bend. Captain Bastien Levarre, son of a former imperial Head Commander turned pirate, leads his fiercely loyal crew who may prove valuable allies, but are hiding secrets of their own. The deeper they sail into imperial waters, the more Sera must face old wounds and the crown she will soon inherit. To save her friend, she’ll have to trust the very people she’s deceiving and risk revealing who and what she truly is.

The Luszien Heir explores themes of ecocentrism and anti-colonialism as well as balancing duty and desire, altruism and freedom. Forbidden love, impending war, broody pirates, and a rebellious mermaid protagonist are also to be expected.