What an incredible book – everyone should read it.

Whip smart and brilliantly paced, it combines outstanding writing with a thriller’s pace. I loved it.

Delicate, beautiful book about the frailties of life and teh many ways we can start again after heartbreak

Spare, elegant, introspective and retrospective, an island novel about a woman who leaves her current life, forces herself to exile from a reason unknown to us at the beginning of the novel and arrives at a small coastal town where no one knows her. A man appears, just as emotionally misguided as her. A lot of escape from oneself, regret, anguish and longing. There is the sea, there are tides and the seaside desolated landscape in the off-season as a beautiful metaphor for life. Of course I liked it.

A piercing, melancholy portrait of a troubled woman. Mara has left behind the trappings of her old life and boarded a bus for another country. No one here knows a thing about her. She’s free to reinvent herself, but the past won’t stop haunting her. Gradually we learn that her daughter was stillborn. She gets a job in a wine store, starts furtively sleeping upstairs in the stock room to save money, and gets drunk after hours with her boss. Freeman describes all of this with laser precision, pulling in just enough of Mara’s history to ground the story and account for her motivations. The narration is fragmentary; I idly asked myself if a first-person perspective would have made the novel more intimate – like in Brood by Jackie Polzin. The storyline also felt oddly familiar (Talking to the Dead, Swimming Lessons, Sunburn, Ladder of Years). (3.5 stars; full review at Shiny New Books)

A strangely hypnotic story about a woman in grief who is in freefall and finds herself in a seaside resort out of season. Lots of dream like narrative, connections with the sea and how she drifts through this time. Fascinating.

A magnificent book portraying a woman struggling to cope after a late miscarriage. It starts as she is leaving home and follows her to an off-season seaside resort where she spends some months drifting and existing. The language is beautiful, just the right balance of sparse and descriptive, and particularly effective when dealing with the protagonist's inner thoughts, which often feature metaphors of the sea and the local coastal landscape.

It's quite a short book, the vignette narrative style leaving significant blank space on most pages, but somehow manages to pack in a huge amount of emotion and character-building within its pages.

Tides is a short, introspective novel about a woman trying to start over after a miscarriage very late in her pregnancy. As the theme suggests, its is a melancholy book, but the brevity of its style gives it a lot of profundity. The metaphor of the sea runs throughout the novel, giving a poetical texture to the relationships that are described between the different characters. A brave, beautiful novel about an overlooked subject.

A compelling, compact novel about a woman who walks out of her life and washes up in an out-of-season seaside town. Very good novelist. Exciting, engrossing, page turner. Keeps you involved even if you know it's fiction. This book was definitely a winner for me, thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend to all.

After losing her child, Mara flees away from her home in Canada, and ends up in a small, coastal town, where she wishes to disappear, where she's unknown.
This novel depicts her numbness, her anguish, her grief and a carelessness that's a result of dismissal of her old self. In her escape, she's left everything behind, including her own self and throughout the novel she's floating nonchalantly around the town.
Then she meets Simon, in whom, as the days pass she observes a deep loneliness and a longing similar to hers. Both are uncertain in their reactions and feelings, and both have their own miseries that we see as the novel proceeds.

The novel is well-written, and even through the narrator is sort of unreliable, it'd not deter your experience. To be fair, it's not very gloomy, it's rather a grieving person's numb narrative. In all, it was a good read.

A strangely hypnotic story about a woman in grief who is in freefall and finds herself in a seaside resort out of season. Lots of dream like narrative, connections with the sea and how she drifts through this time. Fascinating.

With thanks to neutrally and the publisher for an arc in exchange for an honest review.

This is not an easy novel to like. The main character is a woman, late thirties, leaving her old life behind after a miscarriage. She travels from Canada to a small town on the US coast. She does not take care of herself, lets herself go (with the tides), is quite dirty – not an image we easily accept in society or even in literature. In fact, in the village even those people who pretend to care for her in the end appear to have ulterior motives. The atmosphere is bleak, harsh, distressing. One has to be in the mood for it, and I fear I was not really – I kept thinking that the author wanted to show what grief and deep pain can do, but I didn’t feel it. Admittedly though, towards the end I was rather immersed in the story. I have the feeling Sara Freeman´s next book will be better and will certainly look out for it.

Slipping quietly into the new year comes Tides, the carefully crafted, deeply felt debut novel by Canadian-British author Sara Freeman. With its sparse mode of expression, striking imagery and experimental structure, it is a book that tries to be many things at once – but, when all that is stripped away, there remains at its core a fierce, raw story, a moving meditation on grief and love.

In her late thirties, Mara has unmoored herself from life following the trauma of a stillbirth. Unable to bear the presence of her husband or to continue living in the same building as her brother and sister-in-law, who have a new baby, she turns off her phone and sets out on a bus, disembarking in Rome, a small American seaside town. As the summer begins to fold, Mara spends nights on the beach in a drunken stupor, sleeping occasionally in a hostel dormitory with Spanish-speaking seasonal labourers, drowning slowly in the pain of her bereavement.

[...]

Though Tides veritably seethes with pain and anger and bewildered grief, it is all tamped down, held firmly below the surface. Freeman has taken care to keep her prose on an exceptionally tight leash, a stripping-back that is generally effective, hinting powerfully at what lurks beneath. At times, however, the use of sharp imagery – much of it wind- or water-based – can become a little relentless, keeping us frustratingly distant from Mara, as though we are looking at her through a clouded pane. ‘Not feeling is a feeling too,’ writes Freeman, and though the fragmented structure and reticent tone are doubtless there to help us appreciate Mara’s numbness, a novel needs to give as well as taking away.

While we may be frustrated in our wish to get to know Mara, there is no doubt that Freeman is a considered writer, a sharp observer both of human interaction and how people can be shaped by place. The continual presence of the tides and slow turning of the seasons seem gradually to settle Mara, binding her once again to the world in which she must continue to live. By the end of the novel, we are allowed to believe – hope, even – that Rome has been merely a phase, a brief succumbing to a wave of grief from which she can now be freed. But then, an earlier line has hinted at some older, darker urge: ‘She has always wanted this: to slip beneath the surface, to dispossess herself’. Though her running away was doubtless a direct reaction to trauma, the pieces of Mara’s life we have been allowed to slot together build a blurry picture of an existence precariously balanced.

[excerpted from the full review available on my blog]

Mara’s heartbreaking journey from loss to acceptance is very finely observed and written.

The story documents Mara’s life after a loss, and explores her breakdown and actions as she moves alone from family and friends and sinks to the bottom, before rising again.

Mara isn’t a particularly nice or sympathetic character, but the book goes deep into some taboo areas with great sensitivity and strength.

And you are left wondering at the end what the next stage of Mara’s journey will bring.

There is much to commend in this beautifully written short novel. The protagonist, Mara has been set adrift by the loss of a child and the end of a marriage, and finds herself in a small seaside town, with no job, no money, nowhere to live, no plan for the future, and cut off from everyone who cares about her. The book is Mara’s musings on love and loss, and on her misguided attempts to find enough in life to keep her wanting to live. All the people she encounters are vividly drawn but the book peters out at the end, without a satisfying conclusion. I’m sure this is a literary device, but it left me unsatisfied.

I got the Tides by Sara Freeman from NetGalley for free, for a fair and honest review.

The Tides is the story of Mara who flees her settled life after a catastrophic loss, to a wealthy seaside town. Surviving on scraps and swimming on a beach at night.
However, when Mara runs out of money, she, has to find a job at a local wine store, where her connection with the lonely owner Simon, may help to Mara have a better life.
The Tides is a short story and with plenty of time could be read in an afternoon.
this does not mean that Sara Freeman has not packed a lot into this story, not only does it describe the changes in how towns that use tourist as a major part of their income, as the seasons change.
The best thing about the story is the narrative about Mara herself and the description of depression and how she deals with it.
Not every one’s depression will be the same but the way that the writer, shows how the main character, is dealing with her feelings, not only on a day to day, basis, but over the length of novel, which gave the novel to me a more realistic story.
This is definitely a story I can recommend not only for its shortness but the way that Sara Freeman deals with its subject matter in a sensitive manor.

Wow!. What a compelling and emotional story!. Mara, the main character is complex and as the layers peel off, you learn more about her and her story as the book goes on.
She has just lost a baby as the story begins. Her husband has moved out and she is all alone. Mara can't cope with his presence and has asked him to leave. Under her flat lives her brother and his wife who also had a baby just after Mara but unlike her's, their baby has lived. It's hard for her to see this every day. She decides to leave everything that is familiar to her and escape to a place no one knows her and her problems. The pull of a seaside town comes from her mother and what Mara has been told about throughout her childhood. Anonymity is what she loves about this random town but things change here that are out of her control.
I read this book in a day, wanting to see where this story would end up. I found it absolutely fascinating. I am amazed to know this is a debut novel, this writer is as talented as a seasoned pro!.
Many thanks to Netgalley for the free arc book for an honest review.
#ssra Freeman, #grantabooks. #netgalley

Extraordinary, literarily sophisticated, postmodern to its last full-stop.
It’s a good book - very different from any other kind of fiction I read, but I liked it.

"On the long bus journey out, she doesn’t cry or even have a single thought that she can name. She watches the dark impossibility of the road instead, the mostly empty seats ahead of her, the head of a woman a few rows up, listing forward and then jolting back. She does not sleep. She wants to be awake to make her declaration at the border. She will show her passport and when they ask, Where to? she will say without hesitation, The sea."

Mara has suffered a devastating loss and her instinctive reaction is to run away to a small coastal town, where she revels in the anonymity and begins to construct something of a new life for herself (or at least a different reality). With no money, she takes a job at a wine store and is drawn to the manager, Simon, who is also experiencing the breakdown of his marriage and together they take refuge from their shared loneliness and hurt.

Tides is an absorbing story, with a character driven narrative. The novel doesn't have chapters, it's more accurate to say the story is told in vignettes, giving the reader glimpses into Mara's emotions and her actions. Like the tide, this book has its own rhythm and moves at its own pace.

The writing is almost poetic - used sparingly and yet to brilliant effect, I felt that I really got inside Mara's head (spoiler - there are no speech marks used so if that irritates you probably give this one a miss!). Some readers will find Mara cold and almost unlikeable but I think that's because the wall she's built up around herself is so brittle, she can't risk it cracking and losing control.

Haunting, sad, layered and examining themes of loss, grief and identity, Tides is a compelling debut novel.

Will appeal to fans of Ali Smith, Sally Rooney and Rachel Cusk.

'Tides' starts with our central character, Mara, leaving behind her life, family and child in a surprisingly breezy way -that is not to say her decision is an easy one, but it is almost over before she has had a chance to reflect on it.

Mara then drifts somewhat aimlessly for a while, taking on temporary jobs, falling in with the 'wrong' crowds, and eventually finding herself ensconced in another life.

What I found really effective in this short novel was the way that the character feels both numbed and detached from life from the outside, but also, as we find in her innermost thoughts, she appears to be constantly in survival mode, working out when she might need to cut herself off again.

The book ebbs and flows much like the title suggests, with her never quite settling or feeling comfortable, and there is something so tragic about wishing she would make different decisions whilst knowing that she most likely won't. She has reached her limits, and she seems to be surviving the only way she knows how.

I thought this was a beautiful, if haunting, book, and a short one too, but no less effective for that reason.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Interesting and well written debut that reads very fast (also because of the short pages).. I’ll be looking out for a new novel by Freeman. I found this very promising, but she’s no Offill or Cusk yet.
Thank you Granta and Netgalley for the ARC.