Slack-Tide

Often, the best books work on you subcutaneously, by accretion, not letting you know precisely what they’re about until days or even weeks after you’ve finished them… Vivid and memorable… Slack-Tide is a fierce and often very funny send-up of a generation of men who think they can have their cake and eat it.

Slack-Tide, Elanor Dymott’s captivating third novel, is sharp in many ways… [it’s] so convincingly – and, at times, so disastrously – funny… But what makes Slack-Tide distinct is its brilliant depiction of both romantic rapture and heartfelt delusion.

Forensic and spare, Slack-Tide is a persuasively messy (and sinister) tale of mixed-up emotions.

Dymott writes particularly well on sex, and is refreshingly comfortable with the ambiguities at play in each encounter. This psychologically intelligent study… packs a very precise punch.

When two people meet is it need, fantasy or love? Slack-Tide takes us on an urgent journey and kept me reading late into the night.

A compelling and beautiful reflection on the stories that hold us together and keep us apart.

I finished Slack-Tide after a heady, intense few days of reading. Elanor Dymott writes with such lucidity and precision; her characters, setting and premise are real and involving – I enjoyed it immensely.

Slack-Tide is hypnotically compelling. It asks how you can ever get the measure of your own needs, let alone the needs of another, and how difficult it is to mesh your life with theirs. Her lovers are experienced, flawed, damaged and demanding, but she won’t let them be fooled or floored by emotion… Dymott shows that what you want is not always what you need. That the price exacted by finding yourself can be having to let another go.

This novel has the urgency and readability of a whodunit, with an emotional intensity that draws you in, mercilessly, and then spits you back out again… Sharp and potent, this novel explores what it’s like to fall in love and have your heart broken… [it’s] passion at its most convincing.