This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
After seven years and five regions, the whole drowned world turns towards one tide. So do both of them.

For seven years Wren has searched the drowned coasts of Britain for Rhea, the engineer she loved and lost, always reading her as a wake already gone. Now the spring thaw frees the water, and the carried word names one place and one tide: the Meeting Tide, the first great gathering since the Unbinding severed the world fifty years ago, at Havenswell, the floating harbour Wren first sailed from alone.

So she turns west and south, because Rhea has turned too. Not waiting to be crossed to, not chased, but closing the last of the seven years by water from her own end, both bows bound for the same harbour at once. The whole connected world converges on the home anchorage from every road the Drowned Atlas ever opened: the Lagan and their barrage-folk, the Carns up the salt roads, the Knot that is itself a road, the Mere-folk down from the frozen country, and the Estuary Collective readying a harbour that has never held more than its own.

The gathering is warm and crowded and hard, the way a true reunion of separated kin is hard. And in the press of arriving hulls, Wren and Rhea come into the same water at last, close enough to read, with one small space still uncrossed. Then the sky turns, and a spring storm begins to climb the funnel of the Severn against the very tide the gathering is named for, with more boats in one anchorage than any harbour was built to hold.

The Meeting Tide is the fifth and final novel of The Drowned Atlas, a series set generations after the floods in the world of the Tides of Tomorrow, and the convergence the whole series has built towards. It is hopepunk in the tradition of Becky Chambers’s A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, and Lily Brooks-Dalton’s The Light Pirate.