'By midsummer the thing between us was finished, and it was as if a storm had torn the roof from over me.' It is four years since the loss of a child broke her marriage, and Elizabeth is fiercely protective of her independence. She meets Robert -- exuberant, generous, apparently carefree -- and they fall in love with breathtaking speed. Slack-tide tracks the ebbs and flows of the affair: passionate, coercive, intensely sexual. When you've known lasting love and lost it, what price will you pay to find it again?