Description

A compelling, compact novel about a woman who walks out of her life and washes up in an out-of-season seaside town – from a powerful new Canadian-British voice

After a sudden, devastating loss, Mara flees her family and ends up adrift in a wealthy coastal town. Mired in her grief, Mara’s first few days are spent alone, surviving on what scraps of food she can find, and swimming at night in the ocean. When her money runs out and the tourist season comes to a close, Mara finds a job in a local wine store and meets its owner, Simon, a man whose loneliness she immediately recognises as a mirror to her own. As Mara dances around her growing attraction to Simon, she is forced to reckon with both her present desires and her past errors, and with the compulsion she feels to both make and unmake herself.

Tides is a spare, visceral portrait of a woman nearly pulled under by loss and desire. It is an unforgettable introduction to a debut writer of uncommon literary power.

Publisher Review

Brilliant, elegant and unsparing, Tides is a lyrical meditation on selfhood: Sara Freeman illuminates, with a poet's eye, the shifting interior landscape of a woman adrift * Emma Cline * A tale of internal exile, of a woman on the lam from her own loved ones and from the memories that cage her. Tides is a marvel - lyrical and suspenseful at the same time -- Jonathan Dee, Pulitzer Prize finalist author of The Privileges Body and soul, heart and mind, spirit and ground: in this astonishingly moving, taut debut, Sara Freeman gives us a woman on the edge of her own emotional survival. A thrilling, visceral story of grief and renewal * Stacey D'Erasmo, author of Wonderland * To read Sara Freeman's Tides is to witness the stunning aftermath of an intimate disturbance-a wave glowing in the dark. As readers we watch the exquisite beauty of its surface and are plunged inside its startling depths. Freeman reminds us of the grandeur and terror of being alive with others in whose company we might luminesce -- Jennifer Tseng It's one of the most carefully written, brave, honest, devastating books I've read for a long time. There were lines in it so emotionally accurate and merciless they made me squint up my eyes. It's explosive. But the effect is the inside-your-body, barely-heard-properly percussive receipt of a detonation felt at a distance -- Cynan Jones Sara Freeman goes about her business in Tides with such cool composure that I didn't fully register the serious heat of the thing until my eyebrows had started to sizzle. I'm amazed that this is a first novel. There is something very large to be found in this wonderfully compressed work -- Laird Hunt Sara Freeman is such a gifted writer, and she maps with great beauty and precision the territory of loss. This novel is lovely, dark, troubling, and deep -- Alix Ohlin A compulsive read - this story and its characters seeped into me, so that I often thought of them between spells of reading... From the crystalline prose to the plot's syncopated rhythm, Tides is an incisive, memorable debut -- Eliza Robertson, author of Demi-Gods and Wallflowers [Freeman has] a honed lyricism * Daily Telegraph * Freeman hammers her paragraphs down into perfected, indivisible units... A poignant evocation of a woman adrift in the wake of tragedy * Guardian * As well as being beautifully atmospheric, Tides is an intriguing exploration of the effect of sheer propinquity on romance * Financial Times * Mercurial.... Freeman's prose is taut and illuminating, a style that manages to be both detached and emotionally devastating...[A] beautifully observed, elegantly written debut... * Irish Times * Taut and affecting, Tides proceeds in fragments... The reader proceeds as if scanning a littered foreshore in the wake of high tide, uncertain as to whether the next object will be alluring, lurid, or both... the overall effect is quietly seductive. * TLS * Tides is irresistible... I read it in an afternoon, but I'll be thinking about it for a long time * Douglas Stuart * Tides' fragmented chapters gleam like pearls strung on a powerful narrative of grief and survival, some only a line or so long, a page given to each... A beautifully crafted story of a woman learning to live again * Daily Mail *