The Fish Ladder
A Journey Upstream
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
_______________
'A beautiful, strange, intoxicating and utterly unique story' - Philip Pullman
'The memoirist's challenge ... is simple: "Give a true account of yourself". The Fish Ladder accomplishes this brilliantly' - Horatio Clare, Sunday Telegraph
'A beguiling amalgam of personal anecdote, travelogue and family history … Norbury attains a wonder-struck prose poetry' - Independent
_______________
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE GUARDIAN FIRST BOOK AWARD
TELEGRAPH BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
Katharine Norbury was abandoned as a baby in a Liverpool convent. Raised by loving adoptive parents, she grew into a wanderer, drawn by the beauty of the British countryside. One summer, following the miscarriage of a much-longed-for child, Katharine and her nine-year-old daughter Evie decide to follow a river from the sea to its source. But a chance circumstance forces Katharine to the door of the woman who gave her up all those years ago.
Combining travelogue, memoir, exquisite nature writing, fragments of poetry and tales from Celtic mythology, The Fish Ladder is a captivating and life-affirming story about motherhood, marriage, family, and self-discovery, illuminated by the extraordinary majesty of the natural world.
_______________
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.
