HarperCollinsPublishers, Australia 2026
Cover design Emily O’Neill
Cover images rawpixel.com and shutterstock.com
Arianne James’ tale of selkies and other merfolk plunges us into the waters of Tasmania and Scotland with a rich heritage of folklore and seafaring. The powerful feminine is at its core – sisterhood, family and women’s wisdom.
Told between 1885 and 1924, the story encompasses a time of great change and upheaval. The roots of the story reach further back into older generations, some lost to the sea or to time, but still vibrant in the memory of the book’s contemporary heroines.
Clara and Adelaide are sisters, estranged for many years, when it was deemed that the latter had brought shame on the Findlay family name. Adelaide was sent far away and disinherited.
Isla, Clara’s daughter, has a deep attachment to Adelaide, who cared for her as a babe when her mother was institutionalised with what we would now call ‘postpartum trauma disorders’ – significantly, just one of the applications made for centuries of the label of madness given to women who did not conform or who spoke boldly of their desires and thoughts. Adelaide’s return to Tasmania is the catalyst for the drama in this story.
Ettie, Clara and Adelaide’s grandmother, and Eliza, their mother, both deceased, retain a strong presence in their lives. And then there is Agatha, the family servant who has assumed the role of grandmotherly wise woman. Agatha is clever, observant, gifted in the healing arts and possessed of highly intuitive powers – perhaps ‘the sight’.
The pull of the sea and the connection with selkies plays out in varying degrees with these women. There is for Adelaide and Isla an irresistibility about it, but for Clara the need for denial and resistance. Safety battles instinct.
At the same time in the background of this family there is an ugly swathe of patriarchal brutality and control, of men who are unreliable or weak, or downright vicious and dangerous. The actions of these men pose an existential threat to the family across generations and in the present time.
Societal judgements and Clara’s constant need for conformity and acceptance are balanced against the wild freedom of oneness with the sea and its ancient legends. Here the legendary becomes real, entirely believable and unquestionable.
And here too we glimpse the reasons for each woman’s needs and ways of being. All are washed with and certainly soothed by an age-old wisdom offered to them by the doughty Agatha.
As modernity and change come to the society in which the Findlay women move, long-held secrets are uncovered, and ways are found for the threats to the family’s security and home to be overcome.
Isla comes to represent a beacon of change, not merely by asserting her platonic relationship with Jack, and her desire to study in Oxford, but in her determination to be allowed the freedom to choose. In the end, it is a consciousness of love that allows the generations to find the capacity for forgiveness and acceptance, and hence for unity.
This is indeed a story of love and transformation, beautifully metaphorised in the skin shedding of the selkies. It speaks articulately and ardently of the strength of women, of the importance of The Sisterhood, and of a world in which all women can pursue their ways without judgement.
Thank you to HarperCollinsPublishers for my review copy and to Arianne for a fulsome conversation about the themes in this book and the lure of the sea.