Tides | Granta

  • Published: 20/01/2022
  • ISBN: 9781783787609
  • Granta Books
  • 256 pages

Tides

Sara Freeman

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

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

The Author

Sara Freeman is a Montreal-born writer currently living in Boston. She graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in Fiction in 2013. At Columbia, she won the Henfield Prize for the best piece of short fiction by a graduate student. She has both Canadian and British citizenship.

More about the author →

Sara Freeman on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

Notes on Craft

Sara Freeman

Sara Freeman, author of Tides, on writing while seeing the wood for the trees.

Fiction | Granta 156

Tides

Sara Freeman

‘She has always wanted this: to slip beneath the surface, to dispossess herself.’

An extract from Sara Freeman’s forthcoming novel.