The Tide Knot

The disappearance of her father has profound effects upon Sapphy who, along with her brother Conor, is forced to move to nearby St Pirans to escape the memory of her father and establish a new life. St Pirans, however, with its swimming pool, a poor simulation of the sea with ‘dead’ chlorinated water, holds few ties for Sapphy who quickly experiences isolation and loneliness. Thus it is that the calls to Ingo beneath the Cornish waves from the Mer are all the more alluring…

When St Pirans is flooded, Conor and Sapphy become responsible for saving the town from the grips of the water and from Ingo’s colonial intents. Interconnections between the worlds of the sea and the land are depicted most engagingly, as too are the Mer, whose base of emotions and motivations make them a far cry from the saccharine-sweet, scaled creatures made modern but passed down through fairy-tale and folk-lore.

Deep feelings and deep water combine to make this an at once deeply moving and deeply moody novel… JH