The Tide Comes Back: A Life in Short Stories

The Tide Comes Back is a collection of short stories. It contains salient episodes of the author’s early life in Iquitos (Peru), a city in the Amazon rain forest, and of her later travels abroad. As she describes in Part I her days as a boarder in an all-girls Catholic high school, her summers at a farmhouse near the grand river, and her closeness with her mother prior to her death, the uniqueness of the town comes alive. An interesting mixture of rusticity and sophistication, Iquitos in the 1950s was still encapsulated in the remnants of the earlier rubber boom which gave the place an elegant European fl avor. Th e stories in Part II narrate tidbits of culture shock experienced first during the author’s stay in London, and later as she encountered the New York City culture and attempted to establish a bicultural identity in the city where she has now lived for four decades.