Tides

"Paras is the Golden Land, the only land we know. Beyond her shores are only seas, and lonely winds that blow." So the ancient verse goes, a nursery rhyme that all children in Paras are taught and all Parassian adults hold as the truth. One world, one continent. But in Paras, an Age of Reason has begun, and a court scientist has discovered evidence of a second continent. In a land that prides itself on honesty, and where the truth has been enshrined as a way of life and as a religion, Hab, a stalwart mariner, recognizes that all Parassians have believed in a mistruth for much of their history and sets off to discover this new continent. He sails twenty-thousand leagues across the world-spanning ocean, battling iced-over seas, the winnowing of his crew, and most terrifying of all, the killer tides - tides that because of two close moons are monstrous in size and are virtually unnavigable in any but the most ingeniously devised ships.
On the other side of the world, he discovers Ortok, a bleak and inhospitable land, where the strange, wondrous, but often brutal inhabitants, don't have enough to eat and where deceit, dishonesty, and murder are the religion of the day. Hab finds a dark land, the opposite number of his own lush country. And on the way, he discovers an unexpected darkness in his own heart, as well as a creeping moral corruption in Parassian society.