Reviews of Red Tides
Spare, immaculately paced stories; a young mother sleeps through the conference she's escaped the daily grind to attend; a couple try to solve each other's problems and end up exchanging phobias; a patient wanting to ease his psychiatrist's loneliness gives her a hug and only succeeds in terrifying her; reporters in a war zone reproach themselves for not feeding the inhabitants of a starving village, but the villagers are already stalking them for food. Bitterly humorous, Rose constantly contrasts the complacent, ultimately helpless liberalism of the 'civilised' with insurgent raw feeling and deprivation; at once savage and compassionate
Independent on Sunday
The stories in Red Tides have a steely rectitude and an uncompromising determination to face down humiliation and inequality - economical, moral and compassionate.
Guardian
Short stories by a poet, thankfully free of wordsmithery, but with a real knack of rendering wasted time and missed connections, minds full of fog and deep water. These stories grow like weeds between cracks. They tell of the quiet moments in between events, after someone misses a train, before they meet their friends. Arias by Pavarotti drift on to a terrace while a young man is beaten to death. Dilys Rose fishes for contrast and she hauls in a slippery, but oddly beautiful catch.
New Statesman
Red Tides is deceptively light, to the extent that you sometimes feel you've only brushed again a story rather than dwelt inside it. Quite the opposite is the case; the dainty morsels she offers up are effective because they are so sketchy, tempting the reader to speculate, which is when the tail begins to sting.
Observer
By striking inward the stories tap a universality of experience - self-denial, love and loneliness, hope's shy moments (annexing the future from reality ) - and a decency, an empathy with the plights and possibilities of others. Barely an Incident raises a pennant against the obscenity of racism, yet its flutter a ripple of doubt undercutting self-satisfaction, posing questions, seeking to fathom moral courage, sounding its depths and finding evidence of shallows. This diffidence yields in Dilys Rose a susceptibility to a range of lives and longings, renders nuances of feeling, and nurtures compassion. The plight of her women is poignant and powerful precisely because she never writes it into headlines, or points it acusingly like the barrel of a gun. Stealth is her weapon, its edge so sharp you feel its effect as it fillets prejudice, indifference, skewering one's compliant imagination
Scotland on Sunday