Yesterday’s Tides
In May 1942, a wounded man washes ashore on Ocracoke, an island in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Evie Farrow lets him recuperate at her family inn, suspecting that the mysterious Englishman calling himself Sterling Bertrand might prefer to stay hidden. The book then flashes back to 1914 and the spring that Louisa Adair, who lived at the same inn, meets Remington Culbreth. As Sterling recuperates in 1942 and Evie joins his mission to investigate whether a German spy is hiding on her island, Louisa and Rem fall in love in the summer of 1914 and shock his mother, an English baron’s wife, with their sudden and possibly illegal marriage—for Louisa’s mother was white and the father Louisa never knew was Black, a heritage which makes Louisa’s marriage invalid in the Jim Crow South.
When his mother engineers their separation, Louisa returns heartbroken to the family inn while Rem becomes a codebreaker for British intelligence. As both Louisa and Evie try to find their way from grief to new beginnings, the thread between the families emerges in the person of Louisa’s friend Celeste, whose trials connect two war-darkened worlds.
The pleasure of the story rests less on plot than the careful arrangement of scenes that eventually reveal how this family is put together, a mystery that offers great satisfaction in the solving. Amidst war and destruction, deep grief and loss, White handles racking emotions with a quiet, subtle tenderness. The prose is lovely, balanced and refined, the characters well-drawn and endearing. Their suffering is assuaged by deep faith and prayer, and the horrors and cruelty are never more powerful than human love and kindness. A well-crafted, richly imagined, and affecting book, with appearances from characters in White’s other novels that will delight her fans.
