Moon Tide

“[A] powerful first novel … Through Tripp’s skillful use of an ever-shifting point of view, the town emerges as a character itself.…
Moon Tide
is the thinking woman’s beach book. It has all the great themes of summertime reading—love, luck, sex, and the sea. In Tripp’s absorbing novel, you’ll feel as if you’re reading about all of them for the first time.”

—
The Charlotte Observer

“The writing in this exquisitely wrought debut novel is at times so metaphorical that it in effect grants the reader an ‘outside-of-syntax’ experience, pushing past words to create a wash of impressions. This is not to say that Tripp doesn’t tell a good love-with-a-little-danger story.… The book reads with a sealike syntactical cadence, and Tripp shoots it through with visual richness and detail.… Her themes blend and meld: social class and place, the effects of change, the power of words, the frailty of humans against natural life forces, the effects of memory and love.… Tripp presents with clear strength in language and literary tradition.… She’s set her bar pretty high.…”

—
The Denver Post

“Evocative … [a] luminous first novel … a thrilling climax.”

—People

“Unforgettable … brilliant characterizations … shimmering descriptions … [a] gripping climax … [Tripp’s] poetic narrative will remind some of Michael Ondaatje and others of Barry Lopez, but she’s an original.”

—
Library Journal

“[A] dreamy novel … dangerous and beautiful.”

—The Improper Bostonian

“Here is a lyrical debut novel about the magical and mysterious ways science, history, geography, and family interact, and personalities endure.… This is a fascinating and pleasurable reading experience.”

—Fred Leebron, author of
In the Middle of All This

“Tripp’s poetical prose turns some scenes into lyrical feasts for the senses.… [She has a] painter’s awe for the beauty of sensual details.… The reader feels transported by an indelible sense of a time and place.… A young writer with impressive talent and heart.”

—The Providence Journal

“The characters are vividly drawn, but the real star of this novel is its setting, which is described with such great feeling that the fierceness of the sea, the solitude of the village, and the volatility of the climate seem to surround the reader on every page. Tripp is a young writer, blessed with the descriptive powers of a mature poet and writes of breakers and tides and crested swells as though she had spent a lifetime at sea.”

—Baltimore
Sun

“Tripp is adept at illuminating how age shreds the fabric of both memory and consciousness.… [She] writes wonderfully of the characters’ dawning awareness of the storm’s magnitude. In Tripp’s hands, the storm becomes a complex piece of music that builds note by note, swelling to its deadly crescendo.”

—The Boston Globe

“Tripp takes the reader on a journey through these characters with words and images that one usually reserves for dream. It’s as if the author knows that the times she is writing about are gone and is writing a sweet, but often somber epitaph.”

—The Dartmouth Chronicle

“There are dark secrets. There are lyrical set-pieces, which we admired and savored. We hope you will, too. This one goes on the shelf with the books we want to read again someday. It’s not a very big shelf.”

—Voice-Ledger
(Millbrook, N.Y.)

“[A] compelling human story … Through lush prose and radiance of the natural world reminiscent of Rilke, Tripp explores memories and feelings that lie within the emotional layers of [the] ordinary.”

—The Standard-Times
(New Bedford, Mass.)

“[A] beautifully written first novel … Tripp is an unusual stylist who filters all of her characters’ perceptions and emotions through their connection to the land. Haunting, ethereal, and often brutal, her novel achieves the resonance of myth.”

—Booklist

“A shimmering work, an audacious debut; a gem.”

—Edna O’Brien

H
e knows the places in the river where eels will collect under the ice the way he knows the rooms she keeps inside her. He has walked through damp entryways and unlit corridors, opened doors, crossed thresholds. He has stretched himself out on her floor. He sleeps there until its hardness gives way underneath him.

When she comes down that last afternoon to the boathouse, already the sky has turned the color of sulfur. The storm wind rakes off the surface of the river and splits through the trees. The great oaks at Skirdagh bend their heads down toward the stones.

She pushes through the woods and the lower meadow, the sky shredded with bits of debris, branches, leaves. A swallow caught on a gust, a tangle of feathers, sails past her. The rain twists through her hair.

The river has begun to rise. The air is drenched with the damp salt reek of the marsh, and the shriek of the wind—hollow, unearthly—cuts the sky loose from the ground as the water washes in over the pier. She wades through the eelgrass toward the boathouse, her face soaked with spray. The salt sears her eyes but she pushes on, toward the square orange glow of the window.

She reaches the wall and flattens herself against the leeward side. She looks in at him through the window, her face beyond reach of the light.

He sits on the floor with his knife, carving a bird out of pine. He smoothes the wood along the wing, rubs seed oil into it, then runs the flat edge of the knife down so the feathers darken.

It is her shadow that he sees—a darkness that moves over the knife in his hand. He looks up and sees her as she is turning to go. He drops the knife, opens the door, pulls her inside.

She tastes of the salt hay, of rain. He touches her, and her body runs like water through his hands.

PART I
ELIZABETH

Westport Point