A review by angelayoung
The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss

5.0

I loved this book. It drew me in and held me inside its story in that way that really good novels do: I thought about it all the time I wasn't reading it and I didn't want it to end. But don't let this delude you into thinking its subject matter is happy, or escapist. It isn't. The Tidal Zone is about how closely we live with death each and every day, how fragile our physical lives are, but how we don't think about death or its proximity until and unless something happens to make us. The Tidal Zone makes us.

Here are some words from the first chapter:

Suddenly, your heart began; suddenly in the darkness of your mother's womb there was a crackle and a flash and out of nothing, the current began to run. Suddenly you began to breathe. Suddenly, you will stop, you and me and all of us. Your lungs will rest at last and the electric pulse in your pulse will vanish into the darkness from which it came.

And from about the middle:

It is a pity that the things we learn in crisis are all to be found on fridge magnets and greetings cards: seize the day, savour the moment, tell your love - May we live long enough to despise the cliches again, may we heal enough to take for granted sky and water and light, because the state of blind gratitude for breath and blood is not a position of intelligence.

And one from near the end:

Everything felt fragile again on the train home, all the work on the new normality jeopardised. Hospital visits would become normal, I thought. It is simply not possible to live in a state of acute fear and shock for more than a couple of weeks, and so the mind finds a path, a story, a way onwards.

Find this path, this wonderful story about family and love and life and our closeness to death, this way onwards ... it will help when - because it is when and not if - death enters your life next.