Books / Tidewrack
Tidewrack
Out · pre-order from your bookshop. After the worst storm in a century, a woman who catalogues what the sea leaves behind finds a letter addressed to her mother.
“Garroway writes the sea the way other people write weather in the blood. I read it in two sittings and walked to the shore after.” Ines Marrow, author of The Glasshouse Year (early reader)
Publication day
Hardback
ISBN 978-1-9990-4471-2
Pre-order now; posted on publication day
Ebook
ISBN 978-1-9990-4472-9
Pre-order now; downloads on 3 June
Audiobook
ISBN 978-1-9990-4473-6
Read by the author; 10 hrs 15 min
Signed first edition
ISBN 978-1-9990-4471-2
Hollin Street Books only, while they last
Bookshops taking pre-orders
- Your local bookshop (ask them to order it with the ISBN)
- Hollin Street Books, Ibadan (signed copies, posted)
- Hatchway Books
- Larkspur & Lowe
- Paperlane (ebook)
- Earshot Audio (audiobook)
About the book
Every morning for eleven years Edie Rae has walked the same four miles of shore with a notebook and a bucket, writing down what the sea gives back: rope, glass, a child’s shoe, once a church door. The town calls her the tidewrack woman, and mostly leaves her alone.
Then the January storm takes the end of the promenade and two houses on Cliff Row, and on the morning after, wedged in a lobster pot, Edie finds a letter in a sealed jar. It is addressed to her mother, who has been dead for twenty years. It is dated last week.
Tidewrack is a novel about what a place keeps and what it returns, about sisters who stopped speaking, and about the strange comfort of making a list when the world will not stay still.
Early readers
“Garroway writes the sea the way other people write weather in the blood. I read it in two sittings and walked to the shore after.”
“A book about grief that is also, somehow, about joy. Her best yet.”
The opening
The sea gives things back in the order it wants. Edie learned that the first winter, when it returned the left boot of a man called Harold Pike three weeks before it returned Harold Pike, and a full year before it returned the right boot, which she still had, on the shelf above the radiator, because nobody had asked for it.
She walked at first light because that was when the shore was most honest. By nine the dog walkers had been through, and the children, and the men with metal detectors who thought she was competition. At first light it was only her and the gulls and whatever the night had decided.
On the morning after the storm the light came late and grey, and the beach was not a beach. It was a field of things. Planks with nails in them. A traffic cone. Half a garden shed, its window intact, a geranium still in a pot on the sill. Edie stood at the top of the slipway with her notebook open and did not write anything for a long time.
Then she went down, because that was what she did, and she began at the north end, because that was where she always began, and she wrote: plank, plank, cone, shed (half), geranium (alive).
The extract ends here. Tell me when it is out
Reading group guide
Published with the book, 3 June 2027.
The reading group guide for Tidewrack comes out with the book on 3 June 2027, with questions and a note on how it began. The Tideline readers get it first.