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Before I met Sarah Moss, in a tiny, cheerful café in the centre of Coventry, I visited the city’s cathedral I wanted to see it because Adam, the narrator of Moss’s 2016 novel The Tidal Zone, is working on an audio guide to the building The book’s main narrative is interspersed with chapters describing the bombing of Coventry during World War II, and the architect Basil Spence’s plans to build a modern cathedral from the ruins of its 700-year-old incarnation Adam is also engaged in an act of reconstructive imagination His teenage daughter collapsed at school, her heart stopped She survived, but nobody knows why the collapse happened, or whether it will happen again How does he move forward, honestly confronting what has happened and what may yet happen, but not allowing his family’s lives to be dictated by this uncertainty?   How we negotiate the past and imagine the future – personal, social, national – is an overriding concern of Moss’s six novels A sleep-deprived academic struggles to write a book on the history of childhood while raising her own two young children (Night Waking) A Victorian woman grapples with the legacy of her mother’s psychological and physical abuse as she trains to be one of the country’s first female doctors (Bodies of Light and Signs for Lost Children) In The Tidal Zone, Adam is a part-time academic married to a GP, and his future must take into account not only his new awareness of his daughter’s vulnerability, but also the years of austerity that have reshaped higher education and the NHS   Born in 1975, Moss grew up in Manchester and earned a PhD at the University of Oxford Her doctoral research examined the influence of polar exploration on the Romantic imagination; her first novel, Cold Earth (2009), followed a group of students on an archaeological dig in Greenland Recognition for Moss’s work has built steadily, with Bodies of Light, Signs for Lost Children and The Tidal Zone shortlisted