Emily Maguire

She's waking up, it's just before dawn, and straight away there's kind of a strong sense of danger.

She's asleep in this cabin, or she has been asleep in this cabin with her two sons and her husband, who she's very careful not to wake them as she prepares herself to go for a run.

She seems really unhappy to be there.

She describes the cabins as sort of an unappealing muddle of softening wooden walls and cheap plastic windows.

And she takes off on this run.

We're deep inside her consciousness.

It's a real stream of consciousness writing.

So we kind of follow her sort of banal thoughts about the cabin itself and her family, but also increasingly this great joy that she gets from running, from the act itself, and that it's not

It's not about anything except that experience of being in her body and running.

But straightaway we know we're in a Sarah Moss novel because there is already this sense of dread and foreboding building.

I mean, she's a woman alone.

She's running at dawn.

It's pounding rain.

There's barely any light.

She notices the presence of a man in a tent in the woods just beyond the holiday park.

Then as she's sort of heading back,

she suffers this flutter in the chest, which again, immediately reminded me of the tidal zone, which does start with a teenage girl experiencing heart problems.

So you've already got all this sense of danger, both in the environs itself and also within the body of this woman.

And, you know, she sort of reflects, we learned that she's had this heart problem before.

She's been told straight out by a doctor to give up on the running, or if she won't, she should certainly not ever do it alone.