Come the Tide
Sam Reese
978-1-913007-00-3 · 192 pages · 129 × 198 mm · Jun. 2019
In thirteen wistful and haunting stories, Sam Reese traverses the sweeping plains of memory, transforming their hidden landscapes into something familiar. A woman searches for the mysterious place of her birth. An apartment becomes a forest, a bottomless lake a graveyard. A search can return you home again, and a painting can cradle more than just its own history. The tales in Come the Tide, both real and imagined, are circling birds, soaring and diving to find that thing we’re all seeking: ourselves.

Sam Reese is an insatiable traveller and self-confessed short story nerd. When not writing stories, he is usually writing about them; his first critical work, The Short Story in Midcentury America, won the 2018 Arthur Miller Centre First Book Prize.
Praise & Reviews
One to watch this year.
— Daisy Johnson
An eloquent & exciting new voice in NZ fiction.
— Katie Haworth
A masterful collection that probes the role story-telling plays in both shaping and fragmenting our modern relationships. Throughout, the natural world looms large, the self ever threatened by tsunamis and earthquakes as Reese’s lean prose elicits a slow-burning dwam, taking the reader from moments of intimate detail to exploration of universal questions about the world around us.
— Lochlan Bloom
Deceivingly quiet and lushly sensuous.
— Lara Williams
A collection of deep, intimate stories.
— Tim Corballis
Stories like these can make existence feel convincing, and creation worthwhile.
— Prabda Yoon
In Reese’s stories of subtle wonders, the turbulence of human relationships plays out at a human-scale while the threat of submersion/oblivion is always just beyond the page.
— Claire Dean
Excerpts
- Cliff People — Wildness
- Which Way to Ithica? — Storgy
Misc.
- ‘12 or 20 (second series) questions with’
- Interview – Independent Book Review
- Interview – Slow Culture
- Rate or review the book on Goodreads