In delicate and delicious strokes, Katia Ariel’s The Swift Dark Tide renders the discovery and release of the “hidden self” in middle age. It is no mid-life crisis. Rather, it is a mid-life realising of desire and possibility; of queer becoming.

Ariel’s memoir reads as an unabashed re-telling of meticulous diary entries, kept to provide a constant during her love affair with a woman, a period of welcome change. There are other constants: a husband who has carefully soldered their love at its many seams; and their children. It would have been easy to square both life and the memoir on that obvious binary –family or the love of “another woman”. Ariel instead follows the scent of her unquiet body, and what she herself describes as its “animal” intent on triumph.