Books | Rob Kamin Design

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ROB KAMIN

UX Writer & Content Designer

Under All Names

Under All Names began with a question that stayed with me: how does a person inherit a moral world before they are old enough to judge it? I wanted to write about place, labor, masculinity, silence, and complicity through the lens of a rain-soaked working landscape that felt both beautiful and haunted. What drew me in was the tension between the physical grandeur of the natural world and the damage people commit within it, to the land, to one another, and to themselves. As I worked, the novel became an exploration of inheritance in every sense: familial, cultural, spiritual, and social. This is a book about what communities permit, what people refuse to see, and what it costs when someone finally does.

After leaving a role in tech as a writer, I wondered: what happens when systems become extremely good at measuring people, but less capable of seeing them? I wanted to write a near-future story about artificial intelligence, scarcity, and civic decision-making, but the emotional center had to be human and intimate. The book grew around Naomi Venn, a civic language architect whose job is to make machine harm sound humane, until that same language comes for her father. At its heart, this novel is about the people who cannot be summarized.

Murmuration grew out of landscape first: Hood Canal, the Skokomish River, the Olympic Mountains, old timber roads, tidal weather, and the strange way a place can hold memory. I wanted to write a literary novel about work, loss, endurance, and the mystery of ordinary lives shaped by land and labor. The image of starlings moving together became a way to think about family, fate, and the unseen patterns that gather around us. The process has been slower and more atmospheric than my other work, guided by rhythm, place, and the feeling that history is never really gone.

Emerson and the Kraken

Emerson and the Kraken began as a story for children, but also as a way to preserve the wonder of the Pacific Northwest. I wanted it to feel like something half-remembered from tide pools, ferry rides, fog, driftwood, and old maritime lore. The creative process was playful and mythic: a boy encountering something vast, ancient, and misunderstood beneath the surface. At its heart, the book is about curiosity, courage, and learning that the unknown is not always something to fear.

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