High Tide

(Paperback)

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Description

Told more or less in reverse chronological order, High Tide is the story of Ieva, her dead lover, her imprisoned husband and the way their youthful decisions dramatically impacted the rest of their lives. Taking place over three decades, High Tide functions as a sort of psychological mystery, with the full scope of Ieva's personal situation and the relationship between the three main characters only becoming clear at the end of the novel. One of Latvia's most notable young writers, Abele is a fresh voice in European fiction, her prose is direct, evocative and exceptionally beautiful.

Reviews

"What the small cast of characters learns or fails to, what they remember and forget about each other, is carefully orchestrated to yield to us full knowledge of how love or pain came to dominate their lives."Matthew Jakubowski, The National "Abele's novel looks at how life rarely unfolds the way we expect it to, even if it usually offers you things you never thought possible."Tony Malone, Tony's Reading Blog "Abele has the rare ability to find that existential abyss that lies beneath the superficial surface of daily existence."Guntis Berelis "There is something of a dreamlike quality weaving itself all throughout the novel. Even the title, High Tide, lends itself to speculation about the characters' fate as the tide rolls back to sea."World Literature Today "This is a novel that uses the structure effectively and purposefully and triumphs in it. It's a book of the sort of high literary value that you'd expect from a prize-winning novel and in some ways reminded me of Ali Smith's How to be Both in its ability to fuse experimentalism with substance, although I'd argue that Abele's book has a stronger plot and story element to it."Book-Nudge

Author Bio

Inga Abele is a novelist, poet, and playwright. Her novel High Tide received the 2008 Latvian Literature Award, and the 2009 Baltic Assembly Award in Literature. Her work has appeared in such anthologies as New European Poets and Best European Fiction 2010. Kaija Straumanis is a graduate of the MA program in Literary Translation at the University of Rochester, and is the editorial director of Open Letter Books. She translates from both German and Latvian.