A Night in October: Tales from the hurricane coast - a novel

This is a story of hurricane survival - a story of the costs and comforts of living on the hurricane coast. This story of one family's encounter with a storm named Sandy tells of weaknesses and strengths known to all of us, within a setting of beauty and terror - along the Atlantic coast. In this place, where the soul is fed as stoutly as the body on the ocean's riches, and to which people have been drawn for millennia, two worlds collide - one solid and one fluid - one in which people can dwell and one in which we cannot. This collision of worlds, across a changeable, unknowable boundary, holds an attraction that cannot be resisted and sometimes must be escaped. On Monday October 22, 2012, a weather system in the Caribbean caught the attention of meteorologists as a matter of routine. By the next Monday this storm named Sandy, born on the sands of the Sahara, had traveled over six thousand miles - over ocean and island - to one of the most populous coastlines in the world and there, it irrevocably changed the lives of tens of thousands of people.

Robert J. Illo was born in the Bronx in 1958 and spent most of his formative years living on the New York and New Jersey coasts, within walking distance of Atlantic waters. He holds degrees from Penn State University, Capitol College and Drexel University. A licensed architect, he has a design practice in central Pennsylvania from which he takes time, as a licensed structural engineer, to inspect homes and businesses damaged by storms including Katrina, Sandy and many other storms which - like the people whose lives they alter - have names that are not known to us.