The Thousandfold Tide

About the book

In Marea’s Hollow, children are taught three unbreakable rules: never turn your back on the tide, never speak a secret to the wind after moonrise, and never answer when the water calls your name. Sixteen-year-old Emily Voss broke the third rule when she was twelve. For four years she has carried the secret alone—until the sea begins to wake something ancient and fractured beneath the waves. An entity known only as the Sleeper is stirring, and its awakening will drown the village unless four lost fragments are returned to its heart. With her older brother Andrew, a quiet boy named Joseph who still wears his mother’s shell pendant, and two others bound by their own debts to the deep, Emily sets out in a small black boat toward the Heart Reef. They descend past sunken ships and living bone, each step deeper demanding more than they expected to give. The sea forgives, but it never forgets. One by one they will lose something irreplaceable—sight, hearing, steadiness, peace—and Emily must decide whether the world is worth the pieces of themselves they leave behind. A haunting, lyrical novella of sacrifice and remembrance, The Thousandfold Tide is perfect for readers of Neil Gaiman, Cassandra Khaw, and Julia Armfield.