The latest addition to my website is Inga Abele‘s Paisums (High Tide). Unusually, this story is told more or less in reverse order, i.e. it starts with our heroine, Ieva, as she is now, an independent woman, in love but finding this love an unneeded distraction and ends with her birth. We gradually learn of the decisions she makes in her earlier life and how they have affected who she is now and why. She has various problems to overcome – she is brought up by her grandparents and, indeed, her own daughter is brought up by Ieva’s mother. She marries a man to whom she is clearly unsuited – she is an intellectual, he is an anti-intellectual. He will end up in prison for murder and we only find out later why. She has an affair which goes wrong. She struggles with relationships and careers but, somehow, manages to pull through, ending (as we see at the start of the novel) as an independent woman who likes nothing better than to roam the woods. Abele gives us a complex portrait of a woman who may not always make the right choices but does manage to keep her head above water.