High Tide

Franchini has so perfectly captured the light and taste and colour of an Italian summer in this vivid novel about youth, love, art, debauchery and consequences.

Sara Baume, multi-award-winning author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither

As sultry as it is menacing, High Tide is a novel about desire, grief, art. It's about the stories we tell and the stories we hide. High Tide has everything you need: sex, mystery and Mediterranean decadence.

Jarred McGinnis, author of The Coward

A dark, tense, and compulsive novel. The Shelleys and their seedy entourage are uncannily reincarnated as palazzo-parasite, would-be YBAs on a grungy Grand Tour: the result is unputdownable.

Francesa Reese, author of Voyeur

Art, hedonism and the nineties sweating under a menacing Italian sun: I feel intoxicated just thinking of about High Tide. Fans of Ferrante’s darker works will not be disappointed.

Charlotte Tierney, author of The Cat Bride

Brilliant. I was completely beguiled by its woozy, boozy atmosphere; it’s as thrilling and seductive as a beach read, with a corpse washed up in it. High Tide is a complicated, disturbing and intelligent book with all the propulsion of a page-turner.

Amy Sackville, author of Painter to the King

An intoxicating, sweltering and engrossing novel. It is truly one of the best books you will read this year.

Misha Honcharenko, author of Trap Unfolds Me Greedily

Set in the bright, careless delirium of youth and saturated with colour, excess and lust, High Tide is a novel of striking beauty and gathering darkness – poetic, heart-throbbingly pacy and poignant in its exploration of art and agency. I devoured High Tide in a day, but I still wear its salt on my skin.

Alice Ash, author of Paradise Block

Both grimily glamorous and campily Gothic, High Tide is a novel of love, art and insanity. Franchini injects all the thrills of a horror movie into a languidly tragic love story that trespasses from London’s wild art scene to the harshly beautiful Italian coast.

Dizz Tate, author of Brutes

Whip-smart, slyly heartbreaking, and I felt the truth of it in my bones. Franchini dissects ideas of love, dating and identity in a way that feels both ruthless and humane. I loved it.

Sophie Mackintosh, on SHELF LIFE