Emily Maguire

I have.

And it's so wonderful when you find a writer you love and realise that they actually have an extensive backlist that you can work your way through.

So I read Ghostwall earlier this year and absolutely loved it.

It's a very sort of tight, short, claustrophobic kind of book, as is Summerwater, which we'll get to.

And then I went from that to The Tidal Zone, which I think is actually one of the best books I've read in a long time.

I really want to go back and reread it already.

And she just has this incredible way of writing about, you know, she has this real sense of dread and threat, but it's not necessarily a sense that something, some big dramatic event is going to happen.

It's like the existential dread of life when you,

know that, you know, yourself and everyone you love is like a breakable, continually wearing down body living in a world.

And it's sort of this continuous sense of dread and fear of loss.

And the title zone is very much about how do we just get on with things and value our lives in the moment, even when we know that eventually we're going to lose each other.

Yeah.

So she's sort of in that book, particularly the point of view father, point of view character of the title zone is a dad whose teenage daughter has an unexplained, potentially fatal heart problem.

So it sort of starts with this jolt of terror going into this very ordinary middle-class family's life.

And, you know, you do have this sense of dread, like, is this girl going to be okay?

But the story becomes much more than that.

It really becomes about living with this

acceptance that that what is true of that particular teenage daughter is is true of everybody that there's always this potential loss there that sounds amazing it is and you know it sounds sad and a little bit uh depressing which i guess there's elements of thinking too deeply about this stuff that is but but the writing is so beautiful and the attention she pays to to the characters and and really just those ordinary everyday interactions that

that is, you know, looking back on a life, I guess, is where all the meaning and the connection happens.

Yeah, so we do start with this woman, Justine.