The Tide Between Us: An Irish-Caribbean Story of Slavery & Emancipation

The novel opens in January 1991 on Lugdale Estate in North Kerry, Ireland, where a storm has toppled a tree, exposing a skeleton beneath its roots. Yseult Ffrench, the 81-year-old owner of the estate, receives the news from a local police officer and is unsettled but not surprised, sensing that her family's secrets have long been eroding Lugdale's grandeur.

The narrative shifts to 1891 Jamaica, where Art O'Neill, an 80-year-old Irishman, begins writing his memoir for his sons. Art was born in Mein, a mountainous parish in County Kerry. In 1821, when Art is 11, an English landowner named Major Frederick Stratford-Rice is murdered. His son, Colonel Edward Stratford-Rice, acts as magistrate and sentences Art's father, Killian O'Neill, to death by hanging. The Widow McAuliffe, whose son is deported, curses the Colonel and his heirs, declaring that each will die by the hand of his own offspring. Art is captured and shipped to Jamaica with 200 other Irish children destined to cut sugar cane as bonded laborers.

During the voyage, Art befriends Liam Clifford from his parish and Ned Doyle from Kildare. The boys are assigned to Mangrove Plantation at Black River, where they meet Tariq, a friendly Black boy, and Burdan, a hostile older mixed-race enslaved man. Liam, unable to cope with the heat, soon dies. Art discovers Jamaica's natural world through Tariq, who teaches him to fish, hunt, and dive for pearls.

Cian Donnell, a freed elderly man of Irish and African descent, becomes Art's mentor, advising him to exploit his white skin and hide his origins. When Colonel Stratford-Rice and his wife Victoria arrive to take ownership of the plantation, Art recognizes the Colonel as the man who condemned his father. He conceals his hatred, earns the Colonel's trust through diligent work, and rises to head gardener and eventually to overseer.

As overseer, Art fathers a daughter, Arry, and a son, Seán, with Flora, a mixed-race enslaved woman on a neighboring plantation. He is forced to whip his old friend Birky for alleged theft, a moment that compels him to confront his complicity in the slave system. When Flora runs away repeatedly, the children are seized and sold at a scramble, a chaotic slave auction. Art searches for months, sinking into alcoholism. Flora is found dead in a barn. After a near-fatal binge, Art's friends save him. He begins a relationship with Myrtle, a steady enslaved woman.

Art helps Burdan, the Colonel's unacknowledged son, escape to the Maroons, fugitive communities in the Jamaican mountains, after Burdan tries to kill the Colonel. During the Christmas Rebellion of 1831, Burdan returns with rebel forces and beheads the Colonel, enacting the Widow McAuliffe's curse. Victoria rewards Art with land, wages, and a promise of one gold coin for each decade of service. In 1834, Burdan returns six-year-old Arry to Art, having rescued her from a distant plantation. Emancipation comes in 1838. Arry grows into a fierce entrepreneur at the local market.

In 1850, Blair Stratford-Rice, the Colonel's son, returns to Jamaica to reopen the plantation manor. He shifts production to rum but proves an unstable gambler who cycles through two wives who die, producing only daughters. Arry begins a relationship with Blair, enraging Art, and bears him a son, Okeke. Blair educates the boy alongside his legitimate daughters, but Okeke identifies exclusively with the Stratford-Rices and rejects his African and Irish heritage.

Blair marries a third wife, Lydia, a young Anglo-Irish photographer from Lugdale Estate in North Kerry. She bears a son, Henry, who has a condition that prevents him from walking and uses a wheelchair. Blair cruelly forces the boy to crawl. Art's wife Myrtle and his friend Ned both die. Cholera kills Art's daughter Josephine and Arry. Art's common-law wife, Ngozi, takes in Josephine's orphaned son, Akeem, who becomes inseparable from Art's youngest son, Leon.

Okeke falls in with Nicolas Ffrench, a slave trader from Cuba. Art discovers that Okeke has been luring boys from the shores and selling them to countries where slavery persists. Akeem is among those abducted, bound for Morocco. Art and local men capture and kill Ffrench. Art confronts Blair, demanding he find Akeem. Art begins writing his memoir for Leon and demands his seven gold coins from Blair, who stalls. Art reminds Blair of the Widow McAuliffe's curse. On January 2, 1891, Art goes to the plantation manor to collect his coins, handing his written account to Leon and telling the boy not to follow.

Part II returns to 1991 Ireland, following Yseult in third person. Flashbacks reveal that Yseult's father, Tobias Ffrench, brought his family from England to Lugdale in 1921, claiming Spanish-Cuban origins despite his dark skin and inconsistent stories. His wife, Emilia, a Stratford-Rice by birth, married Tobias after becoming pregnant by a man named Jonathan. As a girl, Yseult develops a secret friendship with Mary O'Neill. Mary's father is Art's son Leon, now settled in Ireland as a dark-skinned rabbit-trapper known locally as Leon "Rusty" O'Neill. A man known as Fonsy, who has a disabled arm and cannot speak, also lives with the O'Neills and emerges only at night.

Aunt Lydia, Emilia's elderly aunt who returned from Jamaica decades earlier, grows suspicious of Tobias. On Boxing Day morning, Yseult overhears Lydia confront him in the dining room, declaring she has recognized him as Blair Stratford-Rice's son, who stole the identity of Nicolas Ffrench's dead son. Lydia slaps him and moves out. Yseult later travels to Jamaica, where an innkeeper named Ignatius Duffy reveals that Blair's son Henry shot his own father after years of abuse, and that Lydia fled with Henry and Leon to protect the secret. Duffy also reveals that Lydia helped locate Akeem in a mine in Morocco. Back in Ireland, Yseult confronts Tobias, telling him she knows he is Okeke. He responds with a veiled threat about his will.

Yseult marries Archie Sinclair, a quiet astronomer, primarily to produce an heir for Lugdale, and they have a daughter, Rachel. Fonsy disappears; locals believe he jumped into the sea. In his final years, Tobias wanders the estate at night, drawn to a birch tree on the bog border. He dies at 86 after collapsing on the lawn while Yseult watches from an upstairs window without going to help.

In the 1991 present, forensics confirm the skeleton is a Black man whose spine shows evidence of extreme labor. The tree dates to around 1923, during Tobias's time at Lugdale. Yseult, in chronic pain and dependent on morphine supplied by Rachel's fiancé Laurence, burns old documents and photographs to destroy evidence of the family's past. She overhears Rachel and Laurence discussing her imminent death with cold impatience and realizes Rachel is willing her dead, just as Yseult willed Tobias dead. In a rare moment of empathy, Yseult considers the long chain of cruelty in her family's history and acknowledges that she is as cruel as Tobias and as cruel as Rachel.

The final chapter shifts to Mary O'Neill's perspective. Mary has always known Tobias was Okeke, having received Art's memoir from her father, Leon. She reveals that Blair placed seven gold coins on the desk but refused to hand them over, then shot Art in the back. Leon, who had secretly followed his father, rushed to Art's side. Henry shot Blair from his wheelchair in the study doorway. Lydia fled Jamaica with Henry and Leon. Leon kept two of the gold coins and sent five back to Art's family in Jamaica. He spent years searching for Akeem, eventually finding him in a Moroccan mine and bringing him home to Kerry as the man known as Fonsy. The skeleton is Fonsy, murdered by Tobias after Fonsy began encroaching on Lugdale's grounds, making his presence known to his former captor. Mary has had his remains buried beside her parents under his true name: Akeem.

In the novel's closing scene, Yseult, frail and walking with a cane, approaches Mary at a hotel garden. They sit together watching Mary's grandchildren play. Yseult opens her fist and drops a gold coin, minted in 1860, onto Mary's palm, saying only that it belongs to Mary. She then rises slowly and walks away.