Book Extract: An Orkney Hearth by Sara Romera

Please join me as we welcome Sara Romera to Novel Kicks and the blog tour for An Orkney Hearth; book one in the Love and Other Ports series. 

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.

Written by Sara Romera, a former Cruise Director who spent fifteen years at sea.

Sara has shared an extract from An Orkney Hearth with us today. We hope you enjoy. 

*****beginning of extract*****

Nora Sterling has spent fifteen years at sea being charming at people for a living. Erland Isbister is her Music Director, which puts him on the wrong side of the company handbook, and he is from Orkney. The ship calls at Kirkwall for the day. He takes her up the road to meet Torfinn, the uncle who raised him, and somewhere around the third pot of tea she asks what she believes to be an entirely reasonable question.

Torfinn Isbister was sixty-four years old, five foot eight, and had been waiting behind the door.

Erland knew he had been waiting behind the door because the door opened before they were through the gate, and because Torfinn was wearing a shirt.

“Well,” said Torfinn.

“Torfinn, this is Nora. Nora, ma uncle.”

“Nora.” He took her hand in both of his. “You’ve come a long way for a cup of tea.”

“I’d heard about the tea.”

He was already turning, already going down the hall, already talking. “Come in, come in, mind the step, it’s a bad step, I’ve been meaning to do something about it for twenty years. Have you had your breakfast? You’ll have something.”

“We’ve eaten, Torfinn.”

“On the ship.” Torfinn said it the way a man says in prison. “Sit down, lass, sit down, not that one, the springs have gone in that one. That one.”

The kitchen had not changed in twenty-three years and Erland had never once wanted it to. Same table, same window over the sink, same view out of it: the field going down and away, the grey line of the sea beyond it, and up on the left, on the shoulder of the hill, the low broken shape of the old house.

Torfinn made tea in a pot. He put out bannocks and butter and a cheese and half a fruit loaf, having established with great firmness that neither of them wanted anything, and then he sat down opposite Nora and folded his hands and set about her with the directness of a man who has spent his life on a small island.

“So you’re the Cruise Director.”

“I am.”

“And he works for you.”

“Torfinn,” said Erland.

“He does,” said Nora.

“Aye.” Torfinn nodded slowly, as though a difficult point had been settled. “Well. Somebody had to.”

Nora laughed out loud, and after that it was easy.

It went on for two hours and it should have gone on for four.

Torfinn wanted to know about Uruguay, and about the Philippines, and whether it was true that they had a hospital on the ship, and how many people worked in the galleys, and whether she had ever been frightened. Nora answered every one of them properly, and asked him things back, and somewhere around the second pot she got him onto the bodhrán, which Erland had been dreading and which turned out to be the making of the afternoon.

“It’s a Norse drum.”

“It is not a Norse drum,” said Erland.

“It’s a Norse drum.” Torfinn addressed himself entirely to Nora now, as the only reasonable person present. “You’ll hear people say it’s Irish. Gaelic, they’ll say. And I’ll tell you what I’ve told this boy since he was a bairn, there’s no earthly reason a thing that’s a hoop and a skin should have come from anywhere in particular, and if you’re asking me whether the men who came over here in eight hundred and something had drums on the boats, I’d say they very likely did.”

“That’s not an argument, Torfinn, that’s a wish.”

“It’s a tradition.”

“You made it up in 1994.”

“Nora.” Torfinn ignored him magnificently. “Do you know what they found at Skara Brae?”

“I don’t.”

“Neither does anybody else,” said Torfinn, with enormous satisfaction, “and that’s my point.”

He got onto the name somewhere in the third pot, which Erland had known he would from the moment the door opened.

“You’ll know the name’s a place, I suppose.”

“Isbister?”

“There’s a road down by the pier with it on. His mother and father had a house on it.” Torfinn nodded at Erland. “And this is the family ground, up here. There’s been Isbisters on these islands since before there was a Scotland, and I’ll tell you where it comes from.” Torfinn had stopped moving entirely, which with him was the equivalent of another man standing up. “The Norse earls. Not the ones in the books, the ones before them. Ma grandfather had it from his grandfather and there’s no writing it down, it goes mouth to mouth, and it comes down through this boy’s mother’s side to him.”

“They only remember the axes,” said Erland, to the ceiling.

“They only remember the axes.” Torfinn turned back to Nora. “And that’s what this one’s out of. That line, on his mother’s side. And you’ll say to me that’s a long way back and there’s nothing left of it, and I’ll tell you there is.” He nodded at his nephew, entirely serious. “You’ve been beside him a while now. You’ll have felt it.”

And Nora, who had opened her mouth to say something light, did not say it.

“He’s been saying this since I was nine.”

“I’ve been saying it since before you were born,” said Torfinn, “and I’ll be saying it after.”

Nora had her chin on her hand.

“Is there an Isbister tartan?”

Erland put his cup down.

It is difficult to describe what happened to Torfinn’s face. Nothing moved in it. It went, over about two seconds, from a man mid-flow to a man who has been asked something in his own kitchen that he cannot quite believe he has heard.

“A tartan.”

“Sorry. Is that…” Nora looked between them. “Have I said something?”

“That’s Highland,” said Torfinn. “That’s a Highland thing. That’s Gaels.”

“We’re Norse,” said Erland, not helping at all.

“We’re Norse,” said Torfinn. “Lass, they were still speaking Norn on these islands three hundred years ago. Ma grandmother had words for the weather that aren’t in any dictionary in Britain. And you’re asking me about a tartan.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“No, no.” He was already refilling her cup, entirely restored, delighted with her. “You weren’t to know. Everybody thinks it. They come off the boats in the summer looking for a kilt and a bagpipe and I’ve to tell them, you’ve come three hundred miles too far north for that.”

*****end of extract*****

About Sara Romera –

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.

Say hello to Sara via her website, YouTube and Instagram. 

An Orkney Hearth is book one in the Love and Other Ports series and was released in August 2026. Click to buy on Amazon UK and Amazon US. 

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Laura

I'm Laura. I started Novel Kicks back in 2009 as I wanted a place to discuss books and writing - two loves of my life. As someone who has anxiety, these two things give me, and I am sure countless others, a much needed escape.
There is a monthly book club, writing exercises, prompts, reviews, author interviews, competitions and guest posts. I cover many genres and I hope there is something for everyone.
I grew up by the sea in Dorset and currently live in Poole with my husband, Chris and three cats. I love writing and have a BA (Hons) in Creative Writing from Falmouth University. I am writing my first book. If only I could stop pressing delete. Chris has threatened to stop it from working. Haha.
I have always loved creative writing since I was in first school and would very much like to meet my teacher, Miss Sayers, to say thank you for all the encouragement she gave me then.
When not writing, I love reading, cats, Disney, singing (I can't sing but this doesn't stop me,) and falling into a good TV show or film. If I could step into any fictional world, it would be amongst the characters in ABC's Once Upon a Time.
I love reading many genres and discovering new authors.