Notes from the strandline

For a year I walked the same beach every morning and wrote down what the sea left behind. I did not set out to write a novel. I set out to get out of the house.

The list grew. Rope, in every colour. Glass worn to sugar. A doll’s arm. Forty-one single gloves, which I came to think of as a kind of census of cold hands. Once, after a storm, a whole wooden door, painted green, with a brass number seven still screwed to it.

What I learned, mostly, was patience. The sea does not care what you are looking for. It brings what it brings, in its own order, and the only way to see the pattern is to keep showing up.

That turned out to be a good way to write a book, too. The notebook became Tidewrack. The door is in it. So are the gloves.