Nicholas Muellner's most recent image-text book journeys through shifting tableaux of exile and solitude in the digital age. Seductive, disorienting, informative and allegorical, In Most Tides an Island is at once a glimpse of contemporary post-Soviet queer life, a meditation on solitude and desire, and an inquiry into the nature of photography and poetry in a world consumed by cruelty, longing, resignation and hope. This work emerged from two very different impulses: to witness the lives of closeted gay men in provincial Russia, and to compose the gothic tale of a solitary woman on a remote tropical island. Along the way, these disparate pursuits - one predicated on documentation, the other on invention - unexpectedly converged. Shot along Baltic, Caribbean and Black Sea coastlines, distant landscapes met at the rocky point of Alone. From that vista, they ask: what do intimacy and solitude mean in a radically alienated but hyper-connected world? In Most Tides an Island challenges photographic and literary conventions, collapsing portraiture and landscape, documentary and fiction, metaphor and description into the artist's distinct form of hybrid narrative. This shape-shifting work is threaded together by the voice of the wandering narrator and the unexpected visual echoes between these far-flung landscapes. A mysterious stream of faceless but expressive online profile pictures further links the divergent stories. These anonymous figures serve as an emotional semaphore, signaling across genres and geographies and between language and image.

In To the Island of Tides, Alistair Moffat travels to – and through the history of – the fated island of Lindisfarne. Known by the Romans as Insula Medicata and famous for its monastery, it even survived Viking raids. Today the isle maintains its position as a space for retreat and spiritual renewal. Walking from his home in the Borders, through the historical landscape of Scotland and northern England, Moffat takes us on a pilgrimage in the footsteps of saints and scholars, before arriving for a secular retreat on the Holy Isle. To the Island of Tides is a walk through history, a meditation on the power of place, but also a more personal journey; and a reflection on where life leads us.

A “miraculous” (Newsweek) human drama, based on a true story, from the renowned author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini The island is nearly deserted, haunting, beautiful. Across a slip of ocean lies South Carolina. But for the handful of families on Yamacraw Island, America is a world away. For years the people here lived proudly from the sea, but now its waters are not safe. Waste from industry threatens their very existence unless, somehow, they can learn a new way. But they will learn nothing without someone to teach them, and their school has no teacher—until one man gives a year of his life to the island and its people. Praise for The Water Is Wide “Miraculous . . . an experience of joy.”—Newsweek “A powerfully moving book . . . You will laugh, you will weep, you will be proud and you will rail . . . and you will learn to love the man.”—Charleston News and Courier “A hell of a good story.”—The New York Times “Few novelists write as well, and none as beautifully.”—Lexington Herald-Leader “[Pat] Conroy cuts through his experiences with a sharp edge of irony. . . . He brings emotion, writing talent and anger to his story.”—Baltimore Sun

“STIRLING HAS SURPASSED HIS PREVIOUS WORK,” raved Science Fiction Chronicle of his bestselling novel Island in the Sea of Time, and George R. R. Martin hailed it as “an utterly engaging account of what happens when the isle of Nantucket is whisked back into the Bronze Age.” Now, the adventure continues... In the years since the Event, the Republic of Nantucket has done its best to recreate the better ideas of the modern age. But the evils of its time resurface in the person of William Walker, renegade Coast Guard officer, who is busy building an empire for himself based on conquest by technology. When Walker reaches Greece and recruits several of their greater kinglets to his cause, the people of Nantucket have no choice. If they are to save the primitive world from being plunged into bloodshed on a twentieth-century scale, they must defeat Walker at his own game: war.

The breathtaking adventure continues in the sequel to the much-loved Orphans of the Tide. Orphans Ellie and Seth have crossed an endless ocean in search of freedom and peace. Arriving on the shores of a colourful tropical island ruled by a mysterious queen, it seems they might just have found the perfect new home. But there is trouble brewing in paradise and soon Ellie and Seth find themselves caught up in a dangerous struggle for power - and forced to confront terrible truths from their past . . . Praise for Orphans of the Tide: 'Unputdownable' - Times 'Enthralling' - Daily Express 'Sumptuously atmospheric . . . tirelessly inventive' - Daily Telegraph

Birdie Fuller doesn’t like change. And a lot of change is happening at once. Her daughter and three-year-old grandson are moving out of her apartment to a nearby city. Will Birdie be able to survive the loneliness without Hannah and Gus? She joins a dating website to find companionship and meets the seemingly perfect man. But is their relationship too good to be real? When the past comes back to haunt Birdie, she struggles to maintain the sobriety she’s worked so hard to achieve? While the beauty and wildlife of Palmetto Island provide inspiration for Hannah’s creativity, she realizes that in order to grow her web design business, she must move to a bigger city. But is she ready to leave the security of her mother’s apartment? For three years, she’s been hiding out on the island, avoiding contact with her son’s biological father. She never told Ryan about the pregnancy. He doesn’t know about Gus. When Ryan shows up at Birdie’s cafe out of the blue, Hannah’s world comes crashing down around her. Will she give Ryan another chance? Or will another man steal her heart? Escape to the Lowcountry for the first installment in the Palmetto Island series. Be sure to download Muddy Bottom, the series’s novella prequel, for free.

In Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean, writer, sailor, and surfer Jonathan White takes readers across the globe to discover the science and spirit of ocean tides. In the Arctic, White shimmies under the ice with an Inuit elder to hunt for mussels in the dark cavities left behind at low tide; in China, he races the Silver Dragon, a twenty-five-foot tidal bore that crashes eighty miles up the Qiantang River; in France, he interviews the monks that live in the tide-wrapped monastery of Mont Saint-Michel; in Chile and Scotland, he investigates the growth of tidal power generation; and in Panama and Venice, he delves into how the threat of sea level rise is changing human culture—the very old and very new. Tides combines lyrical prose, colorful adventure travel, and provocative scientific inquiry into the elemental, mysterious paradox that keeps our planet’s waters in constant motion. Photographs, scientific figures, line drawings, and sixteen color photos dramatically illustrate this engaging, expert tour of the tides.

Literary Nonfiction. Southeast Asia Studies. Photography. Interpretred and translated from the Korean by Youngsook Han. magine strolling along the windy shores of Jeju Island, off the southwest coast of Korea. Suddenly, you hear whistling echoing from the sea. Turning to the water, you spot weathered faces bobbing to the surface, and you realize that the sound is the exhaled breath of sea women, known as haenyeo. With a sigh of gratitude, the aging divers have returned to the surface to replenish their aching lungs. Jeju Island's haenyeo are a dying breed--perhaps the last of their generation. As their maternal ancestors did for centuries, they have scoured the island's sea floor, harvesting seaweed, octopuses, sea urchins, turban shells, and abalone. Their numbers have dwindled from 15,000 in the 1970s to approximately 5,600 in recent decades. Driven by economics, these free-divers continue to labor well into their eighties--the hardier ones often plunging 65 feet while holding their breath for two minutes or longer. Brenda Paik Sunoo gathered these women's stories while living in their diving villages for a total of seven months between 2007 and 2009. MOON TIDES is the first book by an American journalist to document the lives of these rare divers through intimate interviews and photographs. Their stories will appeal to those of us desiring a life of purpose--undulating and infinite as the sea.

In less than a decade, the island community has faced the degradation of the wild fishery and rapid growth of aquaculture, an increasing presence of multinational corporations, new federal initiatives with respect to aboriginal policies, and widespread social dysfunction. Joan Marshall uses over twelve years of intensive ethnographic research to chart the nature and pace of social and cultural change on Grand Manan, showing how it relates to globalization and environmental degradation, as well as to a confluence of outside sources.

Adam Nicolson explores the marine life inhabiting seashore rockpools with a scientist’s curiosity and a poet’s wonder in this beautifully illustrated book. The sea is not made of water. Creatures are its genes. Look down as you crouch over the shallows and you will find a periwinkle or a prawn, a claw-displaying crab or a cluster of anemones ready to meet you. No need for binoculars or special stalking skills: go to the rocks and the living will say hello. Inside each rock pool tucked into one of the infinite crevices of the tidal coastline lies a rippling, silent, unknowable universe. Below the stillness of the surface course different currents of endless motion—the ebb and flow of the tide, the steady forward propulsion of the passage of time, and the tiny lifetimes of the rock pool’s creatures, all of which coalesce into the grand narrative of evolution. In Life Between the Tides, Adam Nicolson investigates one of the most revelatory habitats on earth. Under his microscope, we see a prawn’s head become a medieval helmet and a group of “winkles” transform into a Dickensian social scene, with mollusks munching on Stilton and glancing at their pocket watches. Or, rather, is a winkle more like Achilles, an ancient hero, throwing himself toward death for the sake of glory? For Nicolson, who writes “with scientific rigor and a poet’s sense of wonder” (The American Scholar), the world of the rock pools is infinite and as intricate as our own. As Nicolson journeys between the tides, both in the pools he builds along the coast of Scotland and through the timeline of scientific discovery, he is accompanied by great thinkers—no one can escape the pull of the sea. We meet Virginia Woolf and her Waves; a young T. S. Eliot peering into his own rock pool in Massachusetts; even Nicolson’s father-in-law, a classical scholar who would hunt for amethysts along the shoreline, his mind on Heraclitus and the other philosophers of ancient Greece. And, of course, scientists populate the pages; not only their discoveries, but also their doubts and errors, their moments of quiet observation and their thrilling realizations. Everything is within the rock pools, where you can look beyond your own reflection and find the miraculous an inch beneath your nose. “The soul wants to be wet,” Heraclitus said in Ephesus twenty-five hundred years ago. This marvelous book demonstrates why it is so. Includes Color and Black-and-White Photographs