Beach of Stars

National Book Award-winning author Timothy Egan calls David Horsey's Beach of Stars "a wonderful novel" and "a masterful bit of storytelling." National Book Award winner Charles Johnson says, "the novel is amazingly good." Best-selling author Will Schwalbe puts it simply: "The book is terrific." Beach of Stars opens with a 21-year-old college student working a summer job in Mexico. In an act of whimsy, he takes a beer to a young woman on a secluded beach. That simple decision ignites a chain of events that, twenty years on, lures him from his career in city politics into a search for the now-fugitive woman -- a journey of revelation that climaxes in a star-crossed reckoning with the past. More than a romance, more than a mystery, Beach of Stars is an odyssey steered by the small choices, impulsive actions, bad timing and happy coincidences that propel human lives toward calamity or bliss.

David Horsey is a two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. After a long career at The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and six years as a political commentator for The Los Angeles Times, Horsey is now based at The Seattle Times. His work is distributed nationally and internationally by the Tribune syndicate.

Horsey's well-received first novel, "Beach of Stars," was released in December 2025. He has also published eleven books of political cartoons, including his four most recent, "Refuge of Scoundrels" (2013), "Top of the Ticket" (2016), "Drawing Apart" (2020) and "Unhinged USA" (2024).

Besides winning Pulitzers for the Post-Intelligencer in 1999 and 2003, Horsey was a Pulitzer finalist in 1987 and again in 2014 after joining the LA Times. Also in 2014, he received a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for his cartoons on social justice issues. Horsey took first place in the Best of the West journalism competition for his columns about the 2008 presidential campaign.

With a B.A. in Communications from the University of Washington, Horsey began his journalism career as a political reporter for The Daily Journal-American in Bellevue, Washington. In 1979, he went to work as an editorial cartoonist and columnist for the Post-Intelligencer. He was hired by the LA Times in 2012 where he produced "Top of the Ticket," a thrice-weekly pairing of his political commentary and cartoons. In 2018, he moved to The Seattle Times. His career in Seattle and Los Angeles has taken him to national political party conventions, presidential primaries and debates, the Olympic Games, the Super Bowl, assignments in Europe, Japan and Mexico, and two extended stints working at the Hearst Newspapers Washington Bureau.

As a Rotary Foundation Scholar, Horsey earned an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Kent in Canterbury, England. He has been awarded honorary doctorates from both Seattle University and the University of Kent and has been recognized as one the 150 most distinguished graduates of the University of Washington.

A fourth-generation Washingtonian, David Horsey lives in Seattle with his wife, Nole Ann.