SOURCE: "Down & Out in Life," in Commonweal, October 23, 1992, pp. 25-6.

In the following review, Hosmer offers a commendatory assessment of Time and Tide.

Like Milton's elegy "Lycidas," Edna O'Brien's latest novel, Time and Tide, is a haunting water poem, a heartfelt elegy engendered by the two most powerful human emotions: love and loss. Only here the waters swirl not just in a mighty river but also within the human amnion, for this is a book about what is likely the most dangerous of human activities: mothering. O'Brien's achievement in Time and Tide is so extraordinary that this eleventh novel may well eclipse the previous ten, even her first, The Country Girls (1960).

Time and Tide is the story of Nell Steadman, a middle-aged woman from the west of Ireland, long resident in London. Nell first appears musing as she tries frantically to prevent her second son's departure from home...