The Fish Ladder
A Journey Upstream
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Katharine Norbury was abandoned as a baby in a Liverpool convent. Raised by a loving adoptive family, she grew into a wanderer, drawn by the landscape of the British countryside.
One summer, following the miscarriage of a much-longed-for child, Katharine sets out-accompanied by her nine-year-old daughter, Evie-with the idea of following a river from the sea to its source. The luminously observed landscape grounds the walkers, providing both a constant and a context to their expeditions. But what begins as a diversion from grief evolves into a journey to the source of life itself: a life threatening illness forces Katharine to seek a genetic medical history, and this new and unexpected path delivers her to the door of the woman who abandoned her all those years ago.
Combining travelogue, memoir, exquisite nature writing, and fragments of poems with tales from Celtic mythology, The Fish Ladder has a rare emotional resonance. It is a portrait of motherhood, of a literary marriage, a hymn to the adoptive family, but perhaps most of all it is an exploration of the extraordinary majesty of the natural world. Imbued with a keen and joyful intelligence, this original and life-affirming book is set to become a classic of its genre.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this engaging story full of old Welsh and Scottish names, British film editor Norbury uses the search for the source of a river physically as well as metaphorically to convey the need for finding her birth mother. The notion of following a river to its source grew from reading the novel The Well at the World's End by the Scottish writer Neil M. Gunn. Norburry set out several times, either alone or with her nine-year-old daughter, Evie, to find these sources of Dunbeath Water, Scotland, mentioned in the novel, and also many rivers near Norbury's summer cottage in Wales and family home in Cheshire, England. A miscarriage of a baby she eagerly wanted triggered thoughts of her own adoption. She also recalls her long-ago visit to the convent of the Sisters of Mercy, outside of Liverpool on the Mersey River, where she learned from the nuns that she was in fact a cherished baby and cared for by Sister Marie Therese. There are many moments of extraordinary synergy in this limpid, patiently meandering narrative, and Norbury manages to incorporate them in a natural, light-pedaling fashion. Her search for her biological mother, the sudden ill health of her beloved adopted mother, and Norbury's discovery of a tumor lodged deep in her own rib cage all shape an extraordinary and moving journey.
