Tides

‘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, author of The Girls

‘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, author of The Man With My Face

'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 and author of The Privileges

‘Sara Freeman writes wonderful sentences, wavy and surprising and full of sensations, and their sensual pull makes Tides an irresistible debut novel about one woman’s several loves. Mara, “a name like a sour apple, an unripe stone fruit,” is not so hard or bitter-tasting as her name might sound, and her coming back to life is moving’ Christine Schutt, author of Pure Hollywood

‘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, author of Stillicide

‘Gripping and chillingly topical, Tides is precise and pared down to the shape of the myth with the electricity of a real encounter. A vivid, propulsive portrait of grief and resilience, it is impossible to not fall into its hypnotic rhythm – a masterful debut’ Heidi Sopinka, author of The Dictionary of Animal Languages

‘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, author of Neverhome

‘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, author of Dual Citizens