BETWEEN TIDES

Between Tides follows Mara Voss, a South African novelist who has been creatively blocked for two years, as she retreats to a small, remote island off the coast of France to finish - or finally abandon - the book she cannot write.

She arrives expecting solitude. Instead, she finds Inès Aubert, a French painter already living in the cottage next door, who is direct, unhurried, and unsettlingly perceptive. What begins as a cautious neighbourliness becomes, over a single October month, a love that neither woman planned and both have reasons to fear.

As Mara sits for a portrait, survives a storm, and is slowly undone by the rare experience of being truly seen, she realises that the subject she has been writing about for her entire career is the same thing she has been avoiding in her personal life, intimacy without armour.

Inès, for her part, carries her own wound: she has loved someone who left, and she has the paintings to prove it. Letting Mara in means risking the kind of loss she has already survived once.

The novel asks whether two women who have turned self-protection into an art form can choose, before the ferry comes, to put it down.

The answer arrives quietly, in a completed portrait, a two-word promise, and an April morning on a pier.