The Wrong Tide
A Novel
Edward S. Lewis
After his young son drowns, an Oregon Coast boat mechanic begins receiving impossible dry objects surrendered by other mourners - and re-addressed into his grief.
At first, they seem like accidents. Then they begin to feel like invitations. As Jonas is drawn deeper into what the sea is returning, he has to decide what comfort is worth accepting - and where grief ends and something else begins.
We had already started the thing we were going to do for the rest of that season, which was to each keep our own weather and not report it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edward S. Lewis
Edward S. Lewis writes literary fiction about identity, grief, memory, obligation, and the unstable boundaries between one person and another. His novels often begin with a single impossible rule and follow its consequences into intimate relationships, family systems, moral responsibility, and the ways people use love to justify what they cannot let go. He is drawn less to technological futures than to altered ontologies: worlds in which memory, language, place, regret, belief, or relationship itself becomes materially real. His work combines restrained prose with high-concept premises, using the speculative element not as spectacle but as pressure - forcing ordinary people to make choices that reveal what they believe a person owes to another person, to memory, and to themselves.
The Wrong Tide is a literary novel with a speculative premise, set along the Oregon Coast, where one family’s grief becomes entangled with objects the sea should not be able to return.
Rights & representation
THE WRONG TIDE
A novel by Edward S. Lewis
After his young son drowns, Oregon Coast boat mechanic Jonas Strand begins receiving impossible dry objects surrendered by other mourners - and somehow re-addressed into his grief.
At first, the objects seem like accidents. Then they begin to feel like invitations.
As Jonas is drawn deeper into what the sea is returning, the boundary between comfort, possession, and responsibility begins to shift. What he accepts may help him live with what he has lost. It may also ask something of him he cannot give back.
The Wrong Tide is literary fiction with a speculative premise about grief, memory, marriage, and the dangerous desire to make loss bearable.
Literary fiction with a speculative premise
78,000 words
Complete
"There was no water inside."