The highest tide - Jim Lynch

One unforgettable night, thirteen-year-old Miles goes to the flats near his home in search of shellfish, only to discover something startling and remarkable: a giant squid. Instantly he becomes a local celebrity and is pursued by TV crews urging him to explain the phenomenon. His psychic friend Florence predicts that even more astonishing discoveries are to come, indicators of the highest tide in fifty years. Yet Miles worries more about matters closer to home: will his passion for his ex-babysitter Angie go unrequited? Will his arguing parents divorce? Is everything, even the bay, shifting from him?

Jim Lynch is a journalist for the Oregonian. This is his first book.

'***** This novel is so very special. If you reach the last page without having laughed out loud, felt tears well up or at least once sat back in wonder at the extraordinary descriptions of the sea and its creatures, then you may, quite simply, be inhuman'
Independent on Sunday

'Original and appealing. His love of the ocean is infectious … Even the most hard-hearted readers will finish this book wishing they had their own bay to explore'
Matt Thorne, Sunday Telegraph

'The Highest Tide is one of the best novels it has been my pleasure to read for many a day … Buy it you should. It is lyrical, moving, funny and breathtakingly well written … This is a great novel which you will want to reread'
Susan Hill, Spectator

'Poetic yet lean, restrained, lucid and radiant. The metaphors are sharp and newly minted, and the beautifully observed and described details of marine life suffused with a Wordsworthian sense of wonder'
The Times