High Tide

A Novel

Livia Franchini

A taut, sun-soaked noir about art, obsession, and the long shadows cast by a single summer that shimmers with tension and moral unease.

Summer, 1992. Peter, a promising young artist, vanishes off the coast of Tuscany. Ten days later, his body washes ashore, unrecognisable. For one sweltering summer, his death grips the public imagination, before slipping into the haze of nineties myth.

Thirty years on, Peter’s widow, Marie, has become infamous in her own right. A cult but reclusive horror writer, her novels are celebrated for their dark brilliance – but no one knows the woman behind the pseudonym, or the memories she’s spent a lifetime suppressing.

When a retrospective of Peter’s work is announced at a prestigious London gallery, an old friend resurfaces, intent on dragging Marie back into the light and unmasking both her past and her fiction. Drawn reluctantly back to Italy, she feels the past begin to stir: the heat, the secrets, the girl she once was. What does she owe the dead – and how far will she go to protect the living?

Livia Franchini is a writer and translator from Tuscany, Italy, living in London. Her recent publications include the novel Shelf Life, her English-language translation of Lorenza Mazzetti’s The Sky Is Falling, and the anthology Too Little / Too Hard: Writers on the Intersections of Work, Time and Value, co-edited with Lucy Mercer. Livia is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, where she also coordinates The Goldsmiths Prize.

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Endorsements & Reviews

"Art, hedonism and the nineties sweating under a menacing Italian sun: I feel intoxicated just thinking of about High Tide. Fans of Ferrante’s darker works will not be disappointed." Charlotte Tierney, author of The Cat Bride

"As sultry as it is menacing, High Tide is a novel about desire, grief, art. It's about the stories we tell and the stories we hide. High Tide has everything you need: sex, mystery and Mediterranean decadence." Jarred McGinnis, author of The Coward

"Brilliant. I was completely beguiled by its woozy, boozy atmosphere; it’s as thrilling and seductive as a beach read, with a corpse washed up in it. High Tide is a complicated, disturbing and intelligent book with all the propulsion of a page-turner." Amy Sackville, author of Painter to the King

"set in the bright, careless delirium of youth and saturated with colour, excess and lust, High Tide is a novel of striking beauty and gathering darkness – poetic, heart-throbbingly pacy and poignant in its exploration of art and agency. I devoured High Tide in a day, but I still wear its salt on my skin." Alice Ash, author of Paradise Block

"A dark, tense, and compulsive novel. The Shelleys and their seedy entourage are uncannily reincarnated as palazzo-parasite, would-be young artists on a grungy Grand Tour: the result is unputdownable." Francesca Reece, author of Voyeur

"Intoxicating, sweltering and engrossing novel. It is truly one of the best books you will read this year." Misha Honcharenko, author of Trap Unfolds Me Greedily

"High Tide is a beautiful, intelligent and transportive novel about love, co-dependency, grief and the redemption of finding your own voice. Livia writes the hot claustrophobia of first love – and the wounds it leaves behind – forensically, tenderly." Lara Williams, author of Supper Club

"Franchini has so perfectly captured the light and taste and colour of an Italian summer in this vivid novel about youth, love, art, debauchery and consequences." Sara Baume, multi-award-winning author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither