Sarah Maine does not treat the past as something safely concluded. She treats it as something that leaks. Her novels operate on the unglamorous but accurate assumption that history does not stay put, especially in Scotland, where land, labour, religion, and silence are still actively doing work.
The House Between Tides makes this argument without theatrics. The island setting is not a romantic ruin or a gothic playground. It is an economic and social system with memory baked into it. Ownership, displacement, and inheritance are not abstractions. They shape who gets to speak, who gets believed, and who gets erased. Maine understands that the past survives most reliably through property and through stories told by those who benefit from it.
What distinguishes her work from softer historical dual timelines is that the past does not exist to enlighten the present. There is no moral upgrade for modern characters who uncover it. Knowledge does not heal. It destabilises. Maine refuses the comforting lie that exposure equals resolution.
Her background as a journalist shows in the way she handles evidence and omission. The novels are acutely aware of what records preserve and what they destroy. Women’s lives appear in fragments, rumours, half entries, and hostile testimony. Maine does not smooth these gaps. She lets them remain jagged, because that is how historical damage actually presents itself.
In Maine’s fiction, the past is not a lesson. It is a liability.
Scottish fiction often leans on history as atmosphere. Stone walls, salt air, inherited guilt. Maine strips that away and focuses on mechanisms. Who owned the land. Who worked it. Who disappeared from the narrative when it became inconvenient. Her novels are less interested in identity than in continuity, especially the continuity of inequality disguised as tradition.
There is also a refusal of sentimentality about place. Islands and remote communities are not sanctuaries in her work. They are pressure chambers. Intimacy does not equal kindness. Memory circulates faster in small places, and punishment is more efficient. Maine understands that nostalgia for community often belongs to those least constrained by it.
The past persists in Maine’s work because no one ever paid the cost of ending it.
Her fiction resists the market demand for historical reconciliation. There is no moment where the reader is reassured that recognition has fixed anything. Modern characters are not morally superior. They are simply later. They inherit structures they did not build and benefit from silences they did not create, and Maine refuses to let them off the hook for that.
This is why her novels feel unsettled even when the prose is controlled. They do not allow the reader to enjoy the past as spectacle or distance. The past remains active, selective, and unfinished. It keeps shaping outcomes because it was designed to.
Maine does not write about history as memory. She writes about it as infrastructure. And infrastructure does not disappear just because you acknowledge it exists.
