I had heard very little about this book, but was drawn to it simply from its title and cover, and it has been a revelation. Beautifully written in a sparse and yet wholly immersive style, it drew me into the mind and world of the protagonist, Mara, so deeply that I feel a bit bereft that she’s left me. This is a book about grief, loss, love, sex, and so much more.

This is a slim novel, a devastating story of loss and grief narrated in a pared-down prose that precisely evokes the emptiness felt by the protagonist Mara.

The book opens with her on a bus, heading for the sea, having given a husband his marching orders, left a home, and switched her phone off. She fetches up in a small seaside resort called Rome at the end of the tourist season, rooming in a hostel until her money runs out and it shuts for the winter season, gliding through the days without engaging with anyone at all. It is five months since she suffered a stillbirth, and 'she has no rounded edges any more, no warmth'. She has dispossessed herself. As the town shuts down for the winter she gets a job in a local deli run by Simon whose wife has recently left him taking their young daughter, and whose loneliness Mara recognises. He asks her no questions but tacitly colludes with her use of the attic to sleep in at night, letting the rhythm of the days in the shop soothe them both.

The book is not about events, but about the dissociation from one's self that extreme grief brings, and the process of reconnecting. It is beautifully observed, sparingly told, and makes for an impressive debut.

Canadian writer, Sara Freeman’s debut novel’s a beautifully-realised account of a woman in freefall, grieving after the loss of her child. Mara’s in her late thirties, she leaves home in Canada, crosses into America, and winds up in a small coastal town, dominated by the vacation homes of wealthy families. One of those places that comes to life in the summer months but’s eerily deserted come winter. Mara’s story’s a familiar one in a lot of ways: a woman adrift, she has a brief affair, a series of missed connections with local residents, and reflects on a past that suggests she’s always been in some sense absent or on the verge of fleeing. Freeman writes really well, there’s a controlled lyricism to her prose, mingling with grittier, more down-to-earth elements, some memorable images, and a fluidity to the narrative that drew me in and pulled me through. I’ve seen numerous comparisons being made between Freeman and authors like Rachel Cusk, Jenny Offill, and even Marguerite Duras, but, despite the many things I liked about this, I didn’t think it had the subtle heft of Duras’s vision or the intellectual complexity of Cusk’s. It sometimes seemed like a more stylised, more self-consciously literary, version of the kind of novel I associate with people like Anne Tyler, without her emphasis on detailed, structured storytelling. Freeman’s a writer I’ll definitely look out for in future, but, although I found this first offering promising, there were aspects of the novel I found less than convincing, and as a narrative it didn’t entirely satisfy.

Thanks to Netgalley UK and publisher Granta Publications for an arc.

It took me a while to get into this book, but once I'd attuned to its rhythm I couldn't stop reading. The reader is taken on a journey with Mara, a very flawed character trying to escape a bereavement and broken marriage and encouraged to reflect with her on life and the decisions and journeys one makes. The author's writing is beautifully sparse and lyrical, and I look forward to reading more of her work

Thank you to netgalley and Granta for an advance copy of this book

So much emotion and so many beautiful sentences packed into what is essentially quite a short novel. I absolutely loved this book and could not put it down. The language and visuals that Sara Freeman uses and creates are stunning. Would recommend it to all my like minded friends and family. Excited to see what Freeman writes next!

Mara flees her home after a devastating loss and ends up in an out-of-season seaside town.

It's only 3 stars for me. Clearly, with the subject matter, it was going to be a melancholy novel but there was also something missing in the writing that I just can‘t put my finger on. It‘s quite a short book and perhaps just needed a bit more space to be something more.

Tides. A novel named for the sea. The ebb and flow of the water. A novel filled with grief.

It's a short book. I thought I'd read it in a day or so, but it took me far longer. I struggled with the story in the beginning. It has so many elements that I thought I'd love. I'm a sucker for stories about sadness. But there's something missing here.

It's a story about a woman who after a devastating loss runs away from her family, her life, to a place she doesn't know - it has to be by the sea - so that she can start all over again. The protagonist isn't likeable, although she doesn't have to be. We can excuse it as a consequence of her grief. You don't learn her name until almost halfway through the book. Whether it's a conscious decision by the author to lend to the protagonist's desire anonymity is unclear, but to me it just felt a bit weird. Most of the characters somehow felt a little flat, as if you're listening to somebody talk about a friend of a friend whom you know you'll never meet.

The prose is snappy. Paragraphs are short. There are no quotation marks to indicate speech so deciphering who's speaking at any time can be a little tricky. It reads almost like a series of short stories. A long story with flashes of memory (nostalgia?) interspersed. But it can feel a little sloppy. The story flip flops between past and present without warning and I found myself losing interest in the first half of the book.

I found the story picked up a little towards the last 40% of the novel, but it took too long to get there, and then it was over before it really began.

And for a novel named after the sea, I expected it to feature more, almost as another main character. But mostly it stayed in the background, rarely mentioned.

It's not all bad. Some of the writing is positively beautiful. Parts of it flow really well. But overall, for me, it was too flat, a story half told.

This is one of those books that you don't know if you loved it or hated it. The main character isn't always loveable and there is a struggle to support her in all the decisions she makes. The writing is very clever as you can almost follow Mara going mad and the writing unravels echoing her mind. The book made me uneasy and although beautifully written with some amazing pictures of nature painted, it wasn't a comfortable book but a very well written one.

Nothing wrong with this. I just feel it’s a well-trodden path – a traumatised woman conveying her alienation through impressionistic prose.

It didn’t hold my interest enough to continue. DNF

I found this book difficult to read as there seemed, for me personally, to be a lot missing. I didn’t find the characters well drawn at all, even the main person. Sorry but this is not a book I would recommend and I have finished it with no lasting memory of any of its content.

An extraordinary debut novel.A woman suffering great loss leaves her life and ends up in a wealthy sea side community.A difficult woman with flaws a woman a story that drew me in.A new brilliant author who I will be recommending following.#netgalley #granta

Tides by Sara Freeman is an impressive debut novel about a woman forced into making a new life for herself. I really love the way Freeman writes.

An absorbing, gruelling read. The main character is flawed, infuriating but ultimately recognisable. The writing pulls no punches in its description of a woman on the edge of losing control completely.

It's hard to know if this novel came entirely from Sara Freeman's imagination or if she has skin in the game. I'm too much of a gentleman to ask. However, I have experienced the same loss Mara suffered so can quite understand how it destablilises an individual especially when her brother had a live child at almost the same time. I really can't understand his objection to her wet nursing his baby as it could have helped with her grief.. I think this is one of those novels which may become syllabus material in time as there is one heck of an amount to unpack. It wasn't from my normal genre of novels but something about the book's description brought me to it via NetGalley for which I am grateful. I will judge it by its literary merit alone on this occasion as like I said it's not my usual genre.

I got to the end of Tides with something of a sense of relief and thought “Well, what was the point of that?” Shrewd readers will therefore deduce that I didn’t like it.

The story, told in the present-tense, is of a woman whose name, for some reason, we are not told until well after half way through the book. She has, we learn obliquely, lost a child and has left her husband and her family behind without warning, with very little money and few possessions, and ended up in a coastal tourist town as it comes to the end of the season. Here, she is isolated, poor, cold, bleak and alienated. She has occasional sex to manipulate men into helping her and the regrets it, she eventually gets a job and is also helped by the friendship of one woman in the town.

And that’s pretty much it, with a few events which would be spoilers if revealed and a slightly (but only slightly) redemptive note right toward the end. Frankly, I found it rather turgid and depressing to no real end. I didn’t find it a particularly profound study of grief; the emptiness felt by the protagonist is well evoked, but that’s all it is for a very long time. This is a small example of the prose: “She is sandwiched between the two of them: the old and the young, the drunk and the nearly drunk. She pictures herself this way: cold cut, melted cheese, a tomato slick with seeds.” There is so much in this vein and with this rhythm that I found rather mannered. And picturing herself as “cold cut, melted cheese, a tomato slick with seeds”? Seriously? It smacks of Creative Writing Course to me and didn’t appeal.

I’m sorry to be so critical, but I really didn’t enjoy Tides. It’s worth two stars rather than one for the evocation of the main character’s bleak emotional state and the merit of being short. Others may get more from it than I did, but it really wasn’t for me.

(My thanks to Granta for an ARC via NetGalley.)

In this beautifully written book, Sara Freeman tells the story of a woman unmoored by grief. Mara leaves home and finds a random seaside town to stop in. She remains apart but when her money runs out and the summer visitors move back to the cities, she is forced to find work.
She takes a job in a deli for Simon, whose wife has moved away, and together they make an attempt to find a path towards healing.
Tides describes an existence where loss takes over a life and nothing else is within reach.
Mara’s loss is slowly revealed throughout and although secondary to the actual breakdown, was a little difficult to fully appreciate. The disintegration of her close relationship with her brother felt incompletely described.

I read only the first chapter.
I did not enjoy the writing style in this tense, maybe my own preference, so I checked a middle chapter as sometimes authors use the device in just the opening chapters but it remained in this tense. The storyline did not engage me enough to persevere.

I loved this book completely and my only gripe was that I wanted it to go on and on. I was swept along in this story and the empathy I had with the characters as the story unfolded. This is a story of escape, survival, the kindness of strangers and the deep shame that all humans carry with them without any place of safety to help them unburden.

Mara's story begins with the complete stripping away of her security as she presses a restart button on her life. She ends up in a desolate seaside town at the beginning of the winter season. Her life is a mess and she's hit rock bottom. The story unfolds with a cast of perfectly executed characters and I was walking alongside Mara and watching her choices from the sidelines as a witness, unable to intervene. If I hadn't been holding my device, I would have been holding my face with my hands. The story had me on the edge of my seat and any spare moments in my day had me reaching for this book. I'm still thinking about this story over a week after finishing it. I'm tempted to return to it and reread it to gain more insight, to find any treasure I might have missed first time around.

Tides by Sara Freeman.
An odd but compelling story of a displaced women who ends up at a small seaside town at the end of summer.
Bleak , sad , lonely ,poignant , but brilliant in its own way.

A impressive slim volume, read easily over a couple of sittings; there is nothing extraneous in this spare, intense presentation of Mara. Coping with unspeakable grief, she isolates herself in a coastal town; gives nothing, and gets nothing. Eventually, she takes what work she can, and begins to imagine living fully again. But there is only one things that can heal her, and we are only allowed to see its beginning.
The overarching image of the sea in all its power and moods, its inherent, indifferent tides are a perfect metaphor for Mara’s life, and her life history.
With thanks to #NetGalley and #Granta for my pre-release copy.