Blog Tour: Tiding – Siân Collins

December 1962. EleanorO’Dowd, a middle-aged piano teacher, is found stabbed and bludgeoned to death. As the Great Freeze of 1963 takes hold, local vicar’s daughter Daphne Morgan finds herself forced to navigate the confusing currents of the adult world, where she must face up to her own crimes and what she knows about the murder. A novel about memory and the power of the imagination…

SiânCollins was born in Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire. An Edinburgh graduate, she taught Anglo Saxon and Medieval Literature in South Africa, worked as an assistant editor on The Lancet, and ran English and Drama departments in several well-known London secondary schools. She returned to Carmarthenshire to teach, write, and relish life in the beautiful Tywi Valley. Her debut novel, Unleaving, was published in 2019.

My thoughts: seen through the eyes of a child, following the murder of her much disliked piano teacher, this charts the life of a small Welsh town, reeling from the tragedy. The police are convinced a local man – deaf mute Johnny – is their perpetrator, and his inability to communicate makes it all too easy to point the finger at him. But Daphne knows that’s not true, she saw something, or did she?

Meanwhile she and her school friends have worries of their own, have they been cursed? Are they responsible for the village’s recent troubles?

Told with a kind tone and full of the misunderstandings and tiny concerns of children, as well as the growing awareness of the unfairness of life, this is a gentle but moving story of a place and its people.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.