After a sudden, devastating loss, Mara flees her family to find solace elsewhere. She lands in a wealthy seaside town, steeped in both her grief and the fear that this tragedy was the inevitable result of her own destructive tendencies.

Deeply detached, Mara spends the first days of her self-imposed exile scrounging for food and drinking on the beach at night. With nothing to tether her, she feels herself fading away, a hollowed-out shell. She eventually finds herself working at a local wine and cheese shop, nursing a burgeoning drinking problem and without a sanctioned place to stay. There she meets Simon, the amiable and lonely owner recently abandoned by his wife and child. The two become friends, and Mara begins to thaw, buoyed by this new connection.

As Mara dances around her growing attraction to Simon, she reckons with her past errors and present desires, the compulsion she feels to both make and unmake herself. Tides is a spare, visceral meditation on the nature of selfhood, intimacy, and the private narratives that shape our lives. It calls to mind the work of Rachel Cusk, Jenny Offill, and Marguerite Duras.

Sara Freeman is a Montreal-born writer currently based out of 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.