Title: High Tide
Author: Livia Franchini
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Doubleday
Publication Date: 5th November 2026
Rating: 4/5
Cover:
Summary:
Summer, 1992. Peter, a promising young artist, vanishes off the coast of Tuscany. Ten days later, his body washes ashore, bloated and unrecognisable. For one sweltering summer, his death grips the public imagination, before fading into the haze of nineties lore.
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 pen name, 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 who seems determined to drag Marie from the shadows and unmask her. Drawn 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?
Review:
High Tide is a kind of loose reimagining of the relationship between Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley and their time in Italy, yet this iteration is set in the early nineties and focuses on Mary and Peter, two artistic students who fall into a heady and intense romance. They end up in Italy for the summer after escaping trouble in England, and find themselves in a small friendship group of hedonistic and intense people. The narrative is split between this almost otherworldly 1992 summer and a reclusive Mary in the near present, reckoning with her past with Peter due to a new retrospective on his work as an artist. There is an element of mystery to the way Peter’s life ended and the circumstances surrounding it but High Tide is really more of an evocative slow burn character piece on grief, obsession, narcissism, and interpersonal relationships. I found the 1992 sections the more compelling of the two timelines, which is filled with an atmospheric tension mixed with the melancholic beauty of an Italian summer. To be frank, none of the characters are likeable in any real sense but there is a sort of dark fascination in the strange corrosive dynamic between Mary, Peter, and their sort of friends which makes the book really quite entrancing to read. I thought it was beautifully written, full of elegance tinged with a sort of disturbing and unsettling feeling to it which worked perfectly for the story. There is a darkness to the whole narrative which I very much enjoyed and although there isn’t much in the way of true mystery about what actually happened that summer, High Tide is more about the why and the how, with a focus on the creative mind, mental illness, the reaching reverberations of the past, and toxic relationships. If you are a fan of moody literary fiction then I think you will enjoy this.
Thank you so much to Anne Cater of Random Things Blog Tours for inviting me on this tour and organising it. I kindly received a copy of the book from the publisher. My review is entirely my own honest opinion.
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