What is Tanis Rideout reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Tanis Rideout, author of The Sea Between Two Shores: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

I tend to have a number of books on the go at any one time. Generally speaking there is a novel, a poetry collection, a research book or two, something visual and a cookbook all piled around me at any one time.

Here’s what’s on the go at the moment:

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai – I got this as a birthday gift from another writer, and am so far loving the prep school setting, the narrator, the questions the book is asking. I’ve been trying to read a lot for plot recently and this one is definitely meeting...[read on]

About The Sea Between Two Shores, from the publisher:

From the bestselling author of Above All Things and inspired by real events, this powerful novel follows two families brought together to reckon with what it means to make amends—for historic wrongs and the wrongs we commit against the ones we love. For readers of Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things, Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, Joan Thomas’s Five Wives, and Michael Christie’s Greenwood.

On a small island in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, the Tabés are a family mourning the death of their son in the aftermath of a devastating cyclone, while worrying over the looming departure of another. Desperate to find a way to change their fates, David Tabé places a phone call halfway around the world to the Stewarts, a family bound to his own through a fraught connection in the distant past—their ancestors met on the island two hundred years earlier, with calamitous results.

In Toronto, the Stewarts are themselves locked in mourning after the accidental drowning of their youngest son. When Michelle Stewart receives David’s invitation to participate in a reconciliation ceremony to put the spirits of their respective ancestors to rest, she accepts in a desperate effort to save herself and her family. As the ceremony approaches, the Tabés and the Stewarts will uncover their shared losses and failings, their fragile hopes for what a better future might hold, and the wounds that stand in the way of freeing themselves from the legacy of past betrayals.

Heart-wrenching, thought-provoking, and morally complex, The Sea Between Two Shores immerses us in the lives of two families connected as much by their desire for healing as by the actions of their ancestors. It is an extraordinary meditation on the complications of history, the possibilities for redemption, and the meaning of the stories we tell ourselves.

Learn more about the book and author at Tanis Rideout's website.

My Book, The Movie: Above All Things.

Writers Read: Tanis Rideout.

--Marshal Zeringue