Angel Khoury

Author of
Between Tides (Dzanc Books, 2021)

Angel Khoury has lived on the Outer Banks of North Carolina for more than 40 years. As dishwasher at the Avalon Fishing Pier, she watched waves roll beneath the cracked floorboards while reading her water-stained copy of MacNeill’s The Hatterasman. She left her dishwashing suds to become associate editor of The Coastland Times newspaper, editor and publisher of Outer Banks Magazine, author of Manteo: A Roanoke Island Town, and secretary of the non-profit Outer Banks Conservationists, which owns the Currituck Beach Lighthouse and Island Farm. A graduate of The University of Virginia, she also attended Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. These experiences all led, inevitably, to her first novel, Between Tides. She lives on Roanoke Island, surrounded by history, among friends both living and dead.

AngelKhoury.com / Instagram / Facebook / Represented by Madison Smartt Bell

Between Tides (Dzanc Books, 2021)

A captivating historical novel set on Cape Cod and North Carolina's Outer Banks, perfect for readers of Where the Crawdads Sing and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping.

1890s, Cape Cod: Between tides, a man deserts his wife and his post as keeper of the Chatham Beach Lifesaving Station to start a new family far to the south, at Cape Hatteras.

1940s: His daughter, en route to serve in World War II with the Red Cross, travels to Cape Cod where she meets his first wife, Blythe, reanimating a life she had long buried: memories of her courtship, her bitter losses, and her husband’s slow-motion vanishing.

Set on two wild seascapes, Cape Cod and North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Between Tides is a lyrical novel for readers of Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Marilynne Robinson―a story of two women stitching together a family ripped at the seams and discovering that even through absence, love’s presence is everlasting.

Praise

"A literary page-turner about ‘the man with two families,’ the wives he betrayed, and the child he left behind. The tale is told by aging recluse Blythe Lodge, the eccentric first wife still living in her ramshackle old house on Cape Cod. Novelist Angel Khoury has invented an incandescent language and a fluid point of view all her own to write this century-spanning story of passion and betrayal, memory and consciousness, love and longing, all set in an isolated, beautifully-limned natural universe of sun and sand and tides, birds and fish and seagrass. I have never read anything quite like it, though I am reminded of Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Housekeeping,’ of Virginia Woolf, of the film ‘Grey Gardens,’ and especially of Lily King’s novel ‘Euphoria’ in which intellectual and physical passion intertwine. Brilliant, ambitious, and enthralling, ‘Between Tides’ is a totally original work of art."
—Lee Smith, author of Fair and Tender Ladies