Between Two Tides

For fifty years, the road to Saltgrave belonged to the sea twice a day. And for fifty years, Dr Edward Maddox was the only doctor on the wrong side of it.

He came to the marsh parish in 1961, twenty-six years old, with a new wife, a diploma, and a black leather bag — the only one of the three he still has. His parish was a village the maps called Saltgrave and the old people called the Grave, reached by a causeway the tide swallowed whole, marked only by leaning withy poles that told you where the firm ground lay. Learn the perches and you live. It was the first thing he was ever taught there, and the truest.

Now he is seventy-six. His wife, Nell — the nurse who kept his nerve as much as his house — lies two winters in the ground. And folded inside his coat is a verdict about his own body that he read in a shaving mirror before any scan confirmed it. So he sits down at last to clear the surgery, and to tell the truth of a country practice.

He writes of the footling breech he coaxed back from blue by lamplight in the hard winter of 1962. Of the boy he could not save. Of the stillborn daughter he and Nell never once spoke of. And of a death certificate he falsified to shield an entire village — a lie he has carried longer than any patient he ever buried.

Between Two Tides is wry, exact, and quietly devastating: the confession of a man who spent his whole life at the bedsides of other people's mortality, and what that long apprenticeship taught him when, at last, it came for his own. Walter Hartley writes with the unhurried authority of the best storytellers, in a voice you will not want to leave.

A luminous novel of medicine, marriage, and reckoning. Cross over while the tide is out — begin reading today.