Cass Loyola, a merchant seaman, abandons the ocean seas to pursue literature and love at a button-down college in New York City. As he struggles to adjust to his new life, he is haunted by the woman he left behind in Cardiff—a bookbinder and practicing witch. At once a seafaring novel, a New York novel, and Cuban novel, Awake Now, Sailor includes pirate fights in the Bay of Bengal, gypsy cab rides into the dark heart of Brooklyn, a drunken mountain climb in Wales, cane cutting in Oriente de Cuba, and a smashed a guitar in a Havana radio station that ends a musical career. The book includes décima campesinas, a poetic form popular in Cuba, and an original sea shanty translated into Welsh by British poet Menna Elfyn.