Time and Tide

A newly reissued novel from the author of Girl , "one of the most celebrated writers in the English language" (NPR's Weekend Edition ) "As her disturbing novel clearly reveals, Edna O'Brien possesses what Henry James called an imagination for disaster...[ Time and Tide ] is an anthology of heightened moments...never less than brilliantly expressed." -Joel Conarroe, The New York Times Book Review Time and Tide is a fragmented novel detailing the loves and catastrophes-and catastrophic loves-of Nell, an Irish woman trying to make a life for herself in the literary world of London. "A whimsical beauty who has swapped the suffocating narrowness of her native land for the loveless brutality of England" ( The Independent ), Nell is in flight from bitter, controlling, and small-minded parents, yet risks becoming just such a mother to her own sons. She seeks comfort and acceptance, yet finds death, drugs, and "an orgy of humiliation" ( The New York Times Book Review ). She seeks companionship, yet finds one after another predatory man: sadists, alcoholics, unscrupulous doctors, and even child molesters. Can Nell extract from the "the vast inhospitality of a creaking world" some measure of beauty and grace? The answer, of course, is yes-but at the price of many illusions.