The Tidal Year: a memoir on grief, swimming and sisterhood AS HEARD ON RADIO 4

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Joelle Owusu-Sekyere, commissioning editor, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Jo Bell at Bell Lomax Moreton, for publication in hardback, e-book, and audio on 4th May 2023. Her work explores love, loss and healing through nature and she’s written for publications including Apple Music, Lonely Planet, Financial Times and National Geographic Traveller. The adventure takes them from a pool hidden in the cliffs of fishing-village Polperro to the quarry lagoon of Abereiddi via Trinkie Wick where locals meet each year to give the pool wall a fresh lick of paint. SOPHIE PIERCE “Reads like a lusciously languid dream sequence… It’s not just about how water can redeem us but how words can too. We spoke about nature writing in multiple languages, pools from our childhood and transitioning through the seasons by swimming.

I've recently fell in love with swimming again, and this is the perfect companion alongside swimming for leisure and getting back into wild swimming. Now I know plot spoilers usually aren’t welcome, but I’ll share this with you: I didn’t finish all the tidal pools. With moments that make you laugh and moments that make you cry, this book reveals the feelings of a young woman learning to live with the loss of a loved one. A compulsive read about what it really means to be alive and how we all struggle to live the best life we can.The Trinkie in Scotland, for example, is located where waves of the North Sea beat ferociously against the cliffs and much of the coastline there is inaccessible. The Tidal Year is a true story about the healing power of wild swimming and the space it creates for reflection, rewilding, and hope. It sounded like something a woman in a film would do and I decided to try and be a version of myself that did things like that. It’s the same at Bude Sea Pool which is hemmed against Summerleaze bay to provide a protected place to enjoy the Atlantic. Some – like Dancing Ledge in Dorset – were built using dynamite to create a lozenge-shaped pool on a rocky platform.

The Tidal Year’ is a delightful debut novel that delivered so much more than a memoir about swimming, or about friendship or even about grief, although it is all of those things as well.The Tidal Year is captured by its subtitle, a memoir of ‘grief, swimming, and sisterhood’ which appeared following the loss of Bromley’s brother. In spite of this situation, we are going to look at inventive ways to look at serving our readership with digital content and of course in print too! We spoke about sustainable harvesting, swimming with seals and the Bosphorus Cross-Continental Swim. I spoke to Christopher about the three-acts of lido history, pioneering female swimmers and how booking your lido slot is like trying to get Glastonbury tickets!