The Tidal Zone
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Get 30 days of Standard free
The Tidal Zone
Buy Now for £13.20
-
Narrated by:
-
Toby Longworth
-
By:
-
Sarah Moss
Summary
A poignant, funny and engrossing exploration of family life centred around a cataclysmic event and its aftermath, from the author of Night Waking and Signs for Lost Children.
Adam is a stay-at-home dad who is also working on a history of the bombing and rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral. He is a good man, and he is happy. But one day he receives a call from his daughter's school to inform him that for no apparent reason, 15-year-old Miriam has collapsed and stopped breathing.
In that moment he is plunged into a world of waiting, agonising, not knowing. The story of his life and the lives of his family are rewritten and retold around this shocking central event, around a body that has inexplicably failed.
In this exceptionally courageous and unflinching novel of contemporary life, Sarah Moss goes where most of us wouldn't dare to look, and the result is riveting - unbearably sad but also miraculously funny and ultimately hopeful. The Tidal Zone explores parental love, overwhelming fear, illness and recovery. It is about clever teenagers and the challenges of marriage. It is about the NHS, academia, sex and gender in the 21st century, the work-life juggle and the politics of packing lunches and loading dishwashers. It confirms Sarah Moss as a unique voice in modern fiction and a writer of luminous intelligence.
©2016 Sarah Moss (P)2016 BolindaStunning writing
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Sarah Moss the author is an academic and The Tidal Zone is a highly sophisticated and multi-layered portrait of both a family and British culture, packed tightly with challenging and stimulating ideas and analysis. But don't be put off if this sounds a bit heavy - it is also utterly and beguilingly ordinary, presenting with stunning reality a family with all the stresses and strains of just about every family we know.
Adam looks after 15 year-old Mimi and 8 year-old Rose at home, putting his own academic work on hold as his GP wife Emma earns the money, returning home late each day drained by working for a struggling NHS, too exhausted to eat. All's well if stressful in a different way for Adam juggling household chores, children's needs, a preoccupied wife and his own attempts to keep up some vestige of academic research - until the call from school that Mimi has stopped breathing and has been rushed to hospital where she stays for the next fortnight before being returned home with the life-saving Epipen she must always carry with her in case the same happens again.
The power of the writing is in the portrayal of the effect of this shattering experience on each member of the family, the strain on the tenuous 'cobweb' which was holding Adam and Emma together even before the shock, and the painful lessons Adam has to learn in allowing Mimi to live again without strangling her with his overwhelming anxiety. All this is described against the everyday backdrop of Adam emptying the dishwasher, buying Rose's new school shoes, making the packed lunches and doing the thousand other domestic tasks as his world seems to have crumbled around him.
It's also about a great deal more than this - the NHS comes in for a great deal of beautifully made swingeing swipes - the night nurses in Mimi's High Dependency unit are paid less per hour than was paid to Father Christmas's elves in a superstore is just one example. University education with sultry students and Faculty meetings reduced to media speak is another target. These themes which are super-articulate - and when they come from Mimi (who reads The New Internationalist) arguing against doing her homework because it's 'a technique for social control' - they can all get too much, too clever.
But the other themes are wonderful and deftly interwoven, such as Adam's work on the rebuilding of Canterbury Cathedral which contributes to the novel's final resolution where life is rebuilt and does go on. And there's the tidal imagery and the real coastal tides, in which Adam's mother drowned when he was young, and where Mimi and Rose look for sea anemones and starfish at the end; tides that ebb and flow like Mimi's breathing in and out which her parents must now always reassure themselves is happening.
In a league of its own for excellence!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I feel this was one of those intellectual books that suppose to bring a fulfillment to my life, a new understanding and depth to others emotional traumas.
For me it was sadly lacking or may be I did not get it entirely, I failed English Literature at school, however that does not stop me from loving books and reading and listening to hundreds..... but this one just did not quite reach the mark of being engaging.
Narration by Toby Longworth was excellent, he lived and breathed the characters to life, I have him to thank for me getting me through to the end.
Reflections from family trauma
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
As with the Sarah Moss books I have read, there is a parallel historical substory, in this case the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral. This device throws the main story into sharp relief.
Toby Longworth’s narration was flawless.
Exquisite Prose
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Bitty
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.