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High above a quaint and sequestered English town, somewhere in Wessex, Meredith Hoddinut resignedly approaches her ninetieth year. She is about to relinquish her position as leader of a small meditation centre, one which she and her long-since departed husband Lawrence had established in the late sixties, close to half a century prior to events depicted. The Retreating Waves is one of three interrelated novellas - The Waves Trilogy - and it documents the second of Meredith's final three silent retreats at her fine country home, Merula House. Along with an omniscient and mordant eye, we are invited into the private worlds of four retreatants, in parallel glimpsing the goings-on of the town's inhabitants, including animated visions even of the inanimate, even of local non-human creatures. In certain senses, and over the course of seven often hallucinatory days, the world on occasion disappears for our retreatants as they escape into episodic fantasy, be it into current lives of theirs, or those of a perhaps imagined past, such as with the fancied revenant. All the while, and throughout the trilogy, the town stirs oblivious, at times exhibiting the sordid and marginalised, at others the ordinariness of its quotidian underbelly, at others still a touching tenderness. Faith, belief, conviction - as you like it - at one and the same time invite their unbidden opposites, and readers are encouraged to proceed like mindedly in considering what may be possible, and what not; for there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in each of our philosophies, save for those such as Meredith and the buried bones of Lawrence.
