The River
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
The Orange Prize long listed debut novel by the author of The German Boy
In 1958, in a small Devon village, on an idyllic summer afternoon, two children are drowned. Their parents, Isabel and Robert, are overcome with grief but, as time passes, their tragedy becomes part of the everyday fabric of village life.
One summer's day, thirty years later, Anna arrives. She comes to the village on a whim, hoping to start afresh - and, without telling anyone she is pregnant, goes to live with Isabel. For a time the women find solace in each other's company, but the baby's arrival causes powerful feelings of loss and heartbreak to surface, and Anna must question whether Isabel's feelings towards her child are entirely benign. . .
'Wastvedt, like Alice Sebold in The Lovely Bones, casts a wide net that goes beyond the immediate family. Captivating and evocative' Toronto Globe and Mail
'Accomplished, dramatic, with a finale that Du Maurier herself would have been proud of' Daily Mail
'Moving, impressive, strongly atmospheric. A remarkable achievement' Penelope Lively
Born in 1954, Patricia Wastvedt grew up in Blackheath, south London, and spent her summers in Kent. She has a degree in Creative Arts and an MA in Creative Writing, and her first novel, The River, written in her late forties, was long-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, The German Boy, is available in Penguin. She teaches at Bath Spa University, and is also a manuscript editor. She lives and writes in a cottage in Somerset.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This eerie first novel plumbs the dark undercurrents of the sleepy English town of Cameldip, where two children drown in 1958, and the grief of their death ripples through generations of its inhabitants. In chapters alternating between the year of the drowning, the parents' lives before the accident and a season 30 years later, Wastvedt brings the players to life: Isabel, who can't make peace with the death of her two children; her husband, Robert, whose rejection by Isabel leads him to Sarah, a young maid; Josef, the drowned children's playmate who grows up with survivor's guilt; and Anna, who comes to Cameldip from London in the 1980s to have her baby out of wedlock. The chapters set in the late 1940s have a lovely, elegiac feel, which makes an effective contrast to the chapters set later, when Wastvedt slowly ratchets up the sense of dread. Then, a teenage crush threatens Josef and Anna's tentative relationship, the patter of small, ghostly feet haunts the town, and Isabel's implacable grief veers toward madness as she takes possession of Anna's son. Though the characters' nostalgia can be frustrating, this suspenseful, atmospheric story progresses with the irresistible flow of the river itself, and readers may find themselves pulled in right up to the ghastly ending.