It fits almost everything in a century of a people's life. Wrecks and glories, light and darkness, people raised and on their knees. And all these years the tide goes up and down. There is a country that is changing even from afar. There are men on the run, who change their names and morals. There are women with clenched teeth. There are children left behind. Skeins of stories and bloods to which the thread has been lost.

In a novel without heroes, where everyone fights, survives and dies trying to be free, it is possible to try to disentangle, amid fear and guilt, where fiction ends and reality begins. And if, at times, the intimacy of writing brings us closer to distant events, in others it is the coldness of the narrative that shelters moments of great depth.

Courtesy of one of the most promising novelists in contemporary Portuguese literature, High Tide is a crude and epic portrait of 20th-century Portugal and of those who lived it, on the threshold where hope, dreams and memory merge and lose in the succession of tides.

A century is a long time. A century is nothing when we learn to swim.