We Run the Tides

'Smart, perceptive, elegant, sad, surprising and addictive. And it's also FUNNY.' Nick Hornby 'What We Run the Tides probes so poignantly is the volatility of female adolescence... Knowing and powerfully enigmatic.' Observer Teenage Eulabee and her magnetic best friend, Maria Fabiola, own the streets of Sea Cliff, their foggy oceanside San Francisco neighbourhood. They know Sea Cliff's homes and beaches, its hidden corners and eccentric characters - as well as the upscale all-girls' school they attend. One day, walking to school with friends, they witness a horrible act - or do they? Eulabee and Maria Fabiola vehemently disagree on what happened, and their rupture is followed by Maria Fabiola's sudden disappearance - a potential kidnapping that shakes the quiet community and threatens to expose unspoken truths. Suspenseful and poignant, We Run the Tides is Vendela Vida's masterful portrait of an inimitable place on the brink of radical transformation. Pre-tech boom San Francisco finds its mirror in the changing lives of the teenage girls at the centre of this story of innocence lost, the pain of too much freedom, and the struggle to find one's authentic self. Told with a gimlet eye and great warmth, We Run the Tides is both a gripping mystery and a tribute to the wonders of youth, in all its beauty and confusion. 'We Run the Tides is hypnotic, knowing, and propulsive as it examines girlhood, friendship, and the strong pull of the past.' Meg Wolitzer

VENDELA VIDA is the author of the acclaimed novel And Now You Can Go (Cape 2003). She is the co-editor of the Believer magazine, the editor of The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, and is a founding board member and teacher at 826 Valencia, a non-profit writing lab. Vida lives with her husband and daughter in North California. Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name was published by Atlantic Books in 2007.