The Tidewater Tales

The Tidewater Tales is a 1987 novel by the American writer John Barth. Its narrative is told from the shared perspectives of a married couple, Peter Sagamore and Katherine Sherritt Sagamore, during Katherine's advanced pregnancy in the summer of 1980. Peter Sagamore is a gifted author, whose gifts have been dwindling in recent years due to a malignant relationship with "the demon Less is More". His fiction has fizzled from sprawling works to solitary words on a page, and his career has correspondingly declined. His wife, Katherine, herself a storyteller by trade, sets him a task: she asks him to take them sailing in the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, and to tell her the story of a couple, much like themselves, and their reckless decision to go sailing at such a delicate time in the wife's pregnancy. The result is "The Tidewater Tales: a novel", composed of the tales these two storytellers swap while sailing in their ship, which they have named Story.[1]

First edition (publ. Putnam)