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Tidal Lock
Seeking to unlock the mystery of her father’s disappearance years before, a mercurial young woman comes to believe that the barren city she inhabits is actually the underworld. Occupying the liminal spaces between reality, illusion, memory and mania, Olana recounts an allegorical journey from profound disorientation to absolute clarity. Told in 265 short, titled passages gathered into four parts, Lindsay Hill’s long awaited second novel offers the reader a challenging, provocative and rewarding narrative experience.
160 pages, Hardcover
Published November 8, 2024
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February 9, 2025
Longlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize, United States and Canada
Did you ever feel you didn't live in a real place? Maybe not. I call this city Tidal Lock. I'm looking for my father or what happened to him.
Tidal Lock by Lindsay Hill is published by McPherson & Company (see below) and is the second novel by the author, although he has written six books of poetry. This is a novel with a poet's sensibility, and, related to that, one that deliberately demands a lot of its reader - Hill has said in an interview (see below) that as a reader he enjoys being challenged by leaps that he has to make, and the reader here needs to do the same.
My name is sometimes Olana. I like to draw things and steal things and go into buildings slated for demolition. Things on the map I stole are not where I used to think they were. Things are a lot like that, I've noticed recently.
The novel is narrated by Olana, or so she styles herself (her name apparently taken from 'Frederic Church’s Moorish mansion on the Hudson'
She tells us - indeed at times she addresses the reader directly - her story in 265 brief and non-linear passages. The manuscript for the book was originally apparently 1500 pages but as published is just 160 pages, so each passage takes 60% of a page on average.
Olana isn't so much an unreliable narrator, as one whose reality, itself a way of processing a grief, is different, displaced from our own and indeed the world she knew.
She tells us early on that My father was thirty-nine when he disappeared. I was thirteen. This was years ago. I don't know how many. The woman who sometimes says she is my mother says he died, although Olana is unconvinced. In her accounts he either walked out of the house one day and never returned, or, or, when they were travelling around Europe on a series of trains, he suddenly got off and the train left before she had a chance to follow. And as for her mother:
I don't know what happened to my mother after she left—or we left her-whichever it was— those times my father swept me away on trains to save my life he said. Maybe she declared us perfectly dead and married an actuary. Something pulled her out I know—like coffee pulls you out of the train wreck of morning—or that time you pulled yourself out of quicksand by pulling someone else in. The thing about perfection is how final it is—how there's no place to go from there. So everything got to that place of nowhere to go. Then she was gone.
She lives in a city that both is and is not the city where she has always lived, one that seems to be being demolished around her, the streets filled with blond dust, one which she speculates as the novel progresses (if progression is the right word in such a non-linear text) may, in fact, be the underworld. And in a basement in one building is a detailed cardboard reconstruction of the city as it once was, which she uses to reconstruct some key locations and events, including eventually finding the house where her father lived.
And she now lives in accomodation provided by a woman she dubs 'the holder':
THE HOLDER
The woman who comes to the house—the one I told you sometimes says she is my mother—I call her the holder because she holds me here—this roof over my head—scant food—a few coins now and then like what you'd spare a beggar on the street. [...] I don't remember who she actually is.
Indeed Olana's theory is that the woman had lost her own daughter - perhaps to 'carnys' at a funfair - and has latched on Olana as a surrogate.
In what at first seems a rather random account, with only a loose association of ideas, various common strands emerge, some poetic/philisophical, some darkly comic, including (there are many more: moths; mosquitos; tourniquets; parallelograms; the figure in a doorway who may be Death; mercury; a broken wooden yardstick; a stolen cookie tin; locked-room mysteries; and knife-throwing acts all also recurrent motifs):
- Scissor Day, the annual anniversary of when she last saw her father, when she systemically cuts to pieces the thing that matters to her most, gradually destroying her physical memories;
- her plans to visit the small town of Needles, in California but close to Death Valley (and known for its extremes of temperature) - it's the kind of places people go when the life their real name stood for is that broken thing you keep but can't use anymore;
- her sessions with her therapist, who she calls Dr. Winker due to his nervous tic, and who may not actually be a therapist, and who seems to have no other clients;
- an obsession with collecting, and later dispersing, buttons (even as a child, I used to go into the closet and cut buttons from the coats of guests and hide them in my room and later take them out and spread them out and how beautiful and magical and hard like a sheet of music they were when laid out in uneven lines);
- her memories of train journeys across Europe, from Scandinavia to Spain and across to Turkey, where her father often invents rather outlandish identities to trick those in their carriage (when disputing a point with some men, he turns to her and says I'd wager this child I found—I mean abducted—I mean adopted—but I've already lost her ... I'm delivering her now to a rug merchant, and she, in turn, dreams up elaborate scenarios of what might happen were he to abandon her;
- her rather odd attempts to find work in stores by acting the role to which she hopes to be employed - being a deliberately difficult customer, as a mystery shopper, or enthusiastically endorsing customer's choices, escorting them to the changing room and the tills, as a salesperson. Unsurprisingly she is often removed by unappreciative store detectives;
- a now derelict theatre, The Pix, in her city, where she is still claims to be able to watch films (at this point she tells the reader she knows we think she is imagining this, but she insists it is real) - sometimes voices talk above the movies ... you can't ask people to be silent in a theatre that's abandoned.
- a particularly needy and hypochondriac friend - Befriending my friend is like getting a leech to treat your attachment disorder [...] she forms a sort of effortless psychoventriloquism where my own worst thoughts about myself come magically out of her mouth. Have you ever noticed how with some people you’re trying to stomp out fires while they’re always lighting new ones? My friend has a thing for setting fires like that—always another combustible thing alight in her life—always someone else’s job to put it out. (the reader might similarly question the friend's existence);
- childhood memories of a cousin, who once stole some precious amber from Olana, and who seems to have rather suffered at Olana's hands - Olana having accidentally severed her toes with a lawnmower (for some reason Olana's attempt to glue them back on failed); shattered her teeth while playing plate frisbee (Olana notes she made sure she three first); and, this last more of a fantasy than an action, planned to lock in an unused chest freezer while playing hide and seek - although the cousin in turn teaches her to swim by throwing her in water with her hands tied; and
- a mirror, she at first refers to theoretically, but later implies she buys, and which is a metaphor for her own experience (and links also to To & Fro from the prize longlist).
MIRROR OF THE DEAD
I saw a gray mirror once in an auction house antique free standing—full length gray like a shell la found at Siren Beach—more luminous than reflective more murky. The mirrors of the dead look just like that I thought. I mean the dead are to the living as that mirror is to mirrors—which means the dead don't work the way the living do—they don't work the way that mirror—gray and lustered and milky—doesn't work as a mirror—which means you can't see anything in it really—you can't find yourself in it—you can't find the room where you stand—everything blurred and indefinite—that's the kind of reflection the mirror of the dead throws back because that's what being dead is like—I'm sure.
And gradually through the blond clouds of dust, and in the greying mirror, a story of sorts may be glimpsed. This also may be different for every reader, given the nature of the novel, so I don't think a spoiler is needed, since this is more my theory: Olana's father was a salesman, but, unlike his bookkeeper wife, frustrated with corporate life, and in trouble for fraud, vanished (indeed likely committed suicide, possibly by drowning, which Olana witnessed). The train journeys she recalls were imaginary, and inspired by a train set she and her father built in their attic. And her father's wife, who she had always assumed was her mother, was in fact his second wife, indeed legally not his wife at all, since he had not divorced his first wife, actually Olana's biological mother, who returns to look after her, and is the woman she knows as 'the holder'.
The novel operates - as Hill has noted - on three levels, which I'd identify as the 'underworld' in which Olana sees herself as living, fairy tales she tells herself as to how she came to be there, but also the real story that she gradually perceives as she emerges from her grief.
RAIN
I woke with a start. The rain sounded like thousands of snapping sticks—like the stick-house of my life coming down. Memory is a fire made only for rain my father had said. Now I knew that Lethe was not a river at all—it was a downpour-and in that deluge was a doorway beyond which stretched the arid streets of the underworld and the underworld's tidal lock on those who walked them. And I saw how every doorway is a standing rainless replica of that vertical river of forgetting-that river that divides the world from the underworld.
A fascinating work - and a novel I plan (unusally for me) to re-read.
Other reviews
Literary Heist
Kirkus
Interview
Interview with Carina Imbornone in New England Review
LH: There’s no question that I write the kind of work that I also enjoy reading. So I like being challenged by leaps that I have to make. It does put a good deal of responsibility on the shoulders of a reader. Not all good readers are interested in that kind of project, but I think some readers are.
CI: You’re co-creating with the reader.
LH: Exactly. And once again, I think that comes from my background in poetry, where readers are traditionally asked to make a lot of leaps. In linear fiction, there’s a lot more guidance. And to some degree—maybe it’s presumptuous to say—a lot less risk.
The publisher - McPherson & Company
McPherson & Company is an independent literary and arts publishing house operated from Kingston, New York. Bruce McPherson founded it in 1974 at Providence, Rhode Island, and three years later relocated to the Hudson Valley. It has been a full-time project since 1984, and has issued roughly 150 editions of more than 100 titles by authors from around the country and around the world. The press specializes in four areas: contemporary fiction (mostly American authors), great “lost” literary works from the Twentieth Century (our Recovered Classics series), non-fiction books dealing with contemporary art, film, aesthetics, and related cultural issues (often presented under the Documentext imprint), and, finally, translations of distinguished works by authors of Italian, Spanish, French, and German fiction and non-fiction. Particular attention is given to the design and quality of the productions: the paper is acid free, the hardcovers employ full cloth over sturdy boards, and some of the paperbacks are both sewn and jacketed. Our books are distributed through a select group of independent bookstores across the United States, and through a few wholesalers.
Did you ever feel you didn't live in a real place? Maybe not. I call this city Tidal Lock. I'm looking for my father or what happened to him.
Tidal Lock by Lindsay Hill is published by McPherson & Company (see below) and is the second novel by the author, although he has written six books of poetry. This is a novel with a poet's sensibility, and, related to that, one that deliberately demands a lot of its reader - Hill has said in an interview (see below) that as a reader he enjoys being challenged by leaps that he has to make, and the reader here needs to do the same.
My name is sometimes Olana. I like to draw things and steal things and go into buildings slated for demolition. Things on the map I stole are not where I used to think they were. Things are a lot like that, I've noticed recently.
The novel is narrated by Olana, or so she styles herself (her name apparently taken from 'Frederic Church’s Moorish mansion on the Hudson'
She tells us - indeed at times she addresses the reader directly - her story in 265 brief and non-linear passages. The manuscript for the book was originally apparently 1500 pages but as published is just 160 pages, so each passage takes 60% of a page on average.
Olana isn't so much an unreliable narrator, as one whose reality, itself a way of processing a grief, is different, displaced from our own and indeed the world she knew.
She tells us early on that My father was thirty-nine when he disappeared. I was thirteen. This was years ago. I don't know how many. The woman who sometimes says she is my mother says he died, although Olana is unconvinced. In her accounts he either walked out of the house one day and never returned, or, or, when they were travelling around Europe on a series of trains, he suddenly got off and the train left before she had a chance to follow. And as for her mother:
I don't know what happened to my mother after she left—or we left her-whichever it was— those times my father swept me away on trains to save my life he said. Maybe she declared us perfectly dead and married an actuary. Something pulled her out I know—like coffee pulls you out of the train wreck of morning—or that time you pulled yourself out of quicksand by pulling someone else in. The thing about perfection is how final it is—how there's no place to go from there. So everything got to that place of nowhere to go. Then she was gone.
She lives in a city that both is and is not the city where she has always lived, one that seems to be being demolished around her, the streets filled with blond dust, one which she speculates as the novel progresses (if progression is the right word in such a non-linear text) may, in fact, be the underworld. And in a basement in one building is a detailed cardboard reconstruction of the city as it once was, which she uses to reconstruct some key locations and events, including eventually finding the house where her father lived.
And she now lives in accomodation provided by a woman she dubs 'the holder':
THE HOLDER
The woman who comes to the house—the one I told you sometimes says she is my mother—I call her the holder because she holds me here—this roof over my head—scant food—a few coins now and then like what you'd spare a beggar on the street. [...] I don't remember who she actually is.
Indeed Olana's theory is that the woman had lost her own daughter - perhaps to 'carnys' at a funfair - and has latched on Olana as a surrogate.
In what at first seems a rather random account, with only a loose association of ideas, various common strands emerge, some poetic/philisophical, some darkly comic, including (there are many more: moths; mosquitos; tourniquets; parallelograms; the figure in a doorway who may be Death; mercury; a broken wooden yardstick; a stolen cookie tin; locked-room mysteries; and knife-throwing acts all also recurrent motifs):
- Scissor Day, the annual anniversary of when she last saw her father, when she systemically cuts to pieces the thing that matters to her most, gradually destroying her physical memories;
- her plans to visit the small town of Needles, in California but close to Death Valley (and known for its extremes of temperature) - it's the kind of places people go when the life their real name stood for is that broken thing you keep but can't use anymore;
- her sessions with her therapist, who she calls Dr. Winker due to his nervous tic, and who may not actually be a therapist, and who seems to have no other clients;
- an obsession with collecting, and later dispersing, buttons (even as a child, I used to go into the closet and cut buttons from the coats of guests and hide them in my room and later take them out and spread them out and how beautiful and magical and hard like a sheet of music they were when laid out in uneven lines);
- her memories of train journeys across Europe, from Scandinavia to Spain and across to Turkey, where her father often invents rather outlandish identities to trick those in their carriage (when disputing a point with some men, he turns to her and says I'd wager this child I found—I mean abducted—I mean adopted—but I've already lost her ... I'm delivering her now to a rug merchant, and she, in turn, dreams up elaborate scenarios of what might happen were he to abandon her;
- her rather odd attempts to find work in stores by acting the role to which she hopes to be employed - being a deliberately difficult customer, as a mystery shopper, or enthusiastically endorsing customer's choices, escorting them to the changing room and the tills, as a salesperson. Unsurprisingly she is often removed by unappreciative store detectives;
- a now derelict theatre, The Pix, in her city, where she is still claims to be able to watch films (at this point she tells the reader she knows we think she is imagining this, but she insists it is real) - sometimes voices talk above the movies ... you can't ask people to be silent in a theatre that's abandoned.
- a particularly needy and hypochondriac friend - Befriending my friend is like getting a leech to treat your attachment disorder [...] she forms a sort of effortless psychoventriloquism where my own worst thoughts about myself come magically out of her mouth. Have you ever noticed how with some people you’re trying to stomp out fires while they’re always lighting new ones? My friend has a thing for setting fires like that—always another combustible thing alight in her life—always someone else’s job to put it out. (the reader might similarly question the friend's existence);
- childhood memories of a cousin, who once stole some precious amber from Olana, and who seems to have rather suffered at Olana's hands - Olana having accidentally severed her toes with a lawnmower (for some reason Olana's attempt to glue them back on failed); shattered her teeth while playing plate frisbee (Olana notes she made sure she three first); and, this last more of a fantasy than an action, planned to lock in an unused chest freezer while playing hide and seek - although the cousin in turn teaches her to swim by throwing her in water with her hands tied; and
- a mirror, she at first refers to theoretically, but later implies she buys, and which is a metaphor for her own experience (and links also to To & Fro from the prize longlist).
MIRROR OF THE DEAD
I saw a gray mirror once in an auction house antique free standing—full length gray like a shell la found at Siren Beach—more luminous than reflective more murky. The mirrors of the dead look just like that I thought. I mean the dead are to the living as that mirror is to mirrors—which means the dead don't work the way the living do—they don't work the way that mirror—gray and lustered and milky—doesn't work as a mirror—which means you can't see anything in it really—you can't find yourself in it—you can't find the room where you stand—everything blurred and indefinite—that's the kind of reflection the mirror of the dead throws back because that's what being dead is like—I'm sure.
And gradually through the blond clouds of dust, and in the greying mirror, a story of sorts may be glimpsed. This also may be different for every reader, given the nature of the novel, so I don't think a spoiler is needed, since this is more my theory: Olana's father was a salesman, but, unlike his bookkeeper wife, frustrated with corporate life, and in trouble for fraud, vanished (indeed likely committed suicide, possibly by drowning, which Olana witnessed). The train journeys she recalls were imaginary, and inspired by a train set she and her father built in their attic. And her father's wife, who she had always assumed was her mother, was in fact his second wife, indeed legally not his wife at all, since he had not divorced his first wife, actually Olana's biological mother, who returns to look after her, and is the woman she knows as 'the holder'.
The novel operates - as Hill has noted - on three levels, which I'd identify as the 'underworld' in which Olana sees herself as living, fairy tales she tells herself as to how she came to be there, but also the real story that she gradually perceives as she emerges from her grief.
RAIN
I woke with a start. The rain sounded like thousands of snapping sticks—like the stick-house of my life coming down. Memory is a fire made only for rain my father had said. Now I knew that Lethe was not a river at all—it was a downpour-and in that deluge was a doorway beyond which stretched the arid streets of the underworld and the underworld's tidal lock on those who walked them. And I saw how every doorway is a standing rainless replica of that vertical river of forgetting-that river that divides the world from the underworld.
A fascinating work - and a novel I plan (unusally for me) to re-read.
Other reviews
Literary Heist
Kirkus
Interview
Interview with Carina Imbornone in New England Review
LH: There’s no question that I write the kind of work that I also enjoy reading. So I like being challenged by leaps that I have to make. It does put a good deal of responsibility on the shoulders of a reader. Not all good readers are interested in that kind of project, but I think some readers are.
CI: You’re co-creating with the reader.
LH: Exactly. And once again, I think that comes from my background in poetry, where readers are traditionally asked to make a lot of leaps. In linear fiction, there’s a lot more guidance. And to some degree—maybe it’s presumptuous to say—a lot less risk.
The publisher - McPherson & Company
McPherson & Company is an independent literary and arts publishing house operated from Kingston, New York. Bruce McPherson founded it in 1974 at Providence, Rhode Island, and three years later relocated to the Hudson Valley. It has been a full-time project since 1984, and has issued roughly 150 editions of more than 100 titles by authors from around the country and around the world. The press specializes in four areas: contemporary fiction (mostly American authors), great “lost” literary works from the Twentieth Century (our Recovered Classics series), non-fiction books dealing with contemporary art, film, aesthetics, and related cultural issues (often presented under the Documentext imprint), and, finally, translations of distinguished works by authors of Italian, Spanish, French, and German fiction and non-fiction. Particular attention is given to the design and quality of the productions: the paper is acid free, the hardcovers employ full cloth over sturdy boards, and some of the paperbacks are both sewn and jacketed. Our books are distributed through a select group of independent bookstores across the United States, and through a few wholesalers.
January 31, 2025
I sentenced you to death in absentia. I sentenced you to rocks in your pockets in the river — I sentenced you to fire without forgiveness—fierce fire relentless fire starting at your feet—I placed you against the wall—I stood you over the trap under the noose—I marched you into winter—I threw you over cliffs—I buried you alive. You came back again and again. I threw you overboard of my life—into the rushing wake the days leave—the thoughtless spent seconds—the self-shuffling self-dealing deck of hours—into the torrent and still you stood—there in my life.
December 13, 2025
I loved this book, although, this isn't a book for everyone. Tidal Lock is a novel length pose poem epic, with the feeling of an art-house film. The language is beautiful, heartbreaking, insightful and brilliant.
This is a book that centers in liminal spaces, abandoned buildings, deserted streets, and the character is as desolate and haunted as the environment.
So, if you're a reader of poetry, you're up for a verrry slow burn, but emotionally rich story, you might give it a shot. Every section break in the book can be read as a standalone poem as far as I'm concerned, so it might even be worth reading several passages and seeing what appeals to you.
This is a book that centers in liminal spaces, abandoned buildings, deserted streets, and the character is as desolate and haunted as the environment.
So, if you're a reader of poetry, you're up for a verrry slow burn, but emotionally rich story, you might give it a shot. Every section break in the book can be read as a standalone poem as far as I'm concerned, so it might even be worth reading several passages and seeing what appeals to you.
February 26, 2026
"I boarded the bus at midnight - as a second language - the second language of leaving - the one I'd been trying to speak to myself through the closed doors of closed days. I boarded the bus at midnight as a doorway opposite the doorway of the dear - in the intervals - through a sideways crack in the world." Lindsay Hill's delightful new book is both a novel and a collection of prose poems; it describes the self as it describes the world. It insists that I come back to revisit before my own life is over.
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