Debut fiction  Where earth meets water  Rachel Hore on The
Water's Edge | Wegener's Jigsaw | Encyclopaedia of Snow | Tiny
Ladies  The Water's Edge, by Louise Tondeur (Headline, £14.99)
The south-coast boarding house with its omnipresent landlady is
a familiar setting of the English novel, but Louise Tondeur
manages to give this faded backdrop a welcome makeover. The
Water's Edge is not only the small Bournemouth hotel where
orphaned 13-year-old Rice fetches up in 1984 after the
proprietor, her mother's schoolfriend Beatrice, offers her a
home, but also one of the novel's recurring themes - the border
where different worlds meet.  Lonely Rice is drawn into a
fascinating network of fatherless women; Beatrice's witchily
beautiful but resentful daughter, Esther, is an object of
adoration. Meanwhile, demented old Margaret frightens the guests
by raving at ghosts from the past. Dark secrets jostle with the
dust beneath the hotel beds, but we are privileged that the
book's narrator, a modern Persephone who pops up