A captivating historical novel set on Cape Cod and North Carolina's Outer Banks, perfect for readers of Where the Crawdads Sing and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping
1890s, Cape Cod: Between tides, a man deserts his wife and his post as keeper of the Chatham Beach Lifesaving Station to start a new family far to the south, at Cape Hatteras.
1940s: His daughter, en route to serve in World War II with the Red Cross, travels to Cape Cod where she meets his first wife, Blythe, reanimating a life she had long buried: memories of her courtship, her bitter losses, and her husband’s slow-motion vanishing.
Set on two wild seascapes, Cape Cod and North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Between Tides is a lyrical novel for readers of Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Marilynne Robinson—a story of two women stitching together a family ripped at the seams and discovering that even through absence, love’s presence is everlasting.
Review
"A literary page-turner about “the man with two families,” the wives he betrayed, and the child he left behind. The tale is told by aging recluse Blythe Lodge, the eccentric first wife still living in her ramshackle old house on Cape Cod. Novelist Angel Khoury has invented an incandescent language and a fluid point of view all her own to write this century-spanning story of passion and betrayal, memory and consciousness, love and longing, all set in an isolated, beautifully-limned natural universe of sun and sand and tides, birds and fish and seagrass. I have never read anything quite like it, though I am reminded of Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping,” of Virginia Woolf, of the film “Grey Gardens,” and especially of Lily King’s novel “Euphoria” in which intellectual and physical passion intertwine. Brilliant, ambitious, and enthralling, “Between Tides” is a totally original work of art."―Lee Smith
About the Author
Angel Khoury has lived on the North Carolina’s Outer Banks for more than forty years. A summer as dishwasher at the Avalon Fishing Pier, waves washing below her feet while reading MacNeill’s The Hatterasman propped above the sink, convinced her to stay. She became associate editor of The Coastland Times, editor and publisher of Outer Banks Magazine, author of Manteo: A Roanoke Island Town, and a board member of the non-profit Outer Banks Conservationists, owners of the Currituck Beach Lighthouse and Island Farm. A native of Suffolk, Virginia, she graduated from The University of Virginia, and also attended Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. These experiences all led, inevitably, to her first novel, Between Tides. She lives on Roanoke Island, surrounded by history, among friends both living and dead.