In moderate physical decline, and with an immoderate weed habit, the novelist Dunja Anko returns home to the Adriatic coast to play detective and solve the mystery of her brother’s death. The going is arduous, the people inscrutable; her old friends have had years to forget – or to convince themselves they don’t remember. Dunja must contend with desire and disgust, curiosity and fear, as she begins to doubt her reasons for returning. Elegantly plotted, funny and self-reflexive, Flood Tide is a psychologically deft exploration of the trauma wrought by human limitation and indecision.
978-1-7395161-5-4
13.9 × 21.6 cm
232 pp paperback
27 October 2025
Fiction
£ 11.99
Mysterious, precise and haunting, Flood Tide suggests that every homecoming is a return to a crime scene.
A dazzling mix of narrative styles (even genres), a linguistic rollercoaster, and a book that demands both close attention and literary sensibility . . . The reader is hooked.
A singularly haunting and stylistically inventive novel on the primal scenes of family origins and sibling trauma. Revitalising tropes from the detective novel, elegy, and sharp social comedy in present-day coastal Slovenia, it sings and fizzes from the page.
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Endorsements
Mysterious, precise and haunting, Flood Tide suggests that every homecoming is a return to a crime scene.
A dazzling mix of narrative styles (even genres), a linguistic rollercoaster, and a book that demands both close attention and literary sensibility . . . The reader is hooked.
A singularly haunting and stylistically inventive novel on the primal scenes of family origins and sibling trauma. Revitalising tropes from the detective novel, elegy, and sharp social comedy in present-day coastal Slovenia, it sings and fizzes from the page.
Schnabl’s prose is matter of fact and yet somehow thrilling. She writes with absolute clarity. Stunning.
If you can imagine a story that’s an unsettling mix of psychological meltdown and detective story, featuring a stoned novelist wracked with back pain, going back to her hometown in Slovenia to masquerade as a Philip Marlowe wannabe to finally find out why her older brother died, and uncovering secrets about her friends and herself she probably would rather not have known, congratulations: you’ve just imagined Ana Schnabl’s brilliant Flood Tide. Readers, come for the moments of revelation, stay for the sight of a writer unravelling her characters until they’re left raw, and you’re left hooked.
Ana Schnabl’s new novel openly defies conventional literary genres: Are we reading a family drama, a troubled homecoming story or a marijuana-infused psychological novel? In a sleepy seaside town in contemporary Slovenia, nothing is what it seems, and no one is what they purport to be … An exciting, brilliantly written book, in which the reader shall not resist stepping into the detective’s shoes.
A fizzing fox in the hen-house of cosy British crime novels. Move over Richard Osman.
A hometown return story with a turn of darkness: surreality both connecting and at once disconnecting the banal with the strangeness of grief.
We enter the story as if eavesdropping on real people – something the heroine herself confirms when she says the tale would not unfold as a psychological, sociological or crime novel, but as life itself.
Press
- Ana Schnabl on using childhood locations and memories in stories about unpleasant people Rippling Pages: Interviews with Writers
- Big Issue Top 5 Balkan books, chosen by Slovenian author and journalist Ana Schnabl
- Better Known Podcast Ana Schnabl
Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent
Wave of Blood
Bourgeois Coldness
A Toast to St Martirià
Darryl
Twenty Shadows
London-rose | Beauty Will Save the World
Holy Smoke
In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities
Tosquelles: Healing Institutions
In Thrall
I have brought you a severed hand
Night Philosophy
This Poor Book
Artificial Gut Feeling
Again! Plenitude and Repetition
Another Sun
Disorganisation & Sex
Stage of Recovery
Let Them Rot
Bosses
Self-portrait
What the Fire Sees—A Divided Reader
World of Interiors
How to Leave the World
Journey to the East of France
