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.

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.

"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

"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

"[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