Weathering - Hardcover

Wood, Lucy

3.63

831 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1408840936 ISBN 13: 9781408840931

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE BETTY TRASK PRIZE 2016

Pearl doesn't know how she's ended up in the river - the same messy, cacophonous river in the same rain-soaked valley she'd been stuck in for years. Or why, for that matter, she'd been stupid enough to fall down those rickety stairs.

Ada, Pearl's daughter, doesn't know how she's ended up back in the house she left thirteen years ago - with no heating apart from a fire she can't light, no way of getting around apart from an old car she's scared to drive, and no company apart from echoing footsteps on the damp floorboards. With her daughter Pepper, she starts to sort through Pearl's things, clearing the house so she can leave and not look back.

Pepper has grown used to following her restless mother from place to place, but this house, with its faded photographs, its boxes of cameras and its stuffed jackdaw, is something new. Fascinated by the scattering of people she meets, by the river that unfurls through the valley, and by the strange old woman who sits on the bank with her feet in the cold, coppery water, Pepper doesn't know why anyone would ever want to leave.

As the first frosts of autumn herald the coming of a long winter and Pepper and Ada find themselves irresistibly entangled with the life of the valley, each will discover the ways that places can take root inside us and bind us together.

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Review:

I think this is a remarkable debut and I'll be surprised if it doesn't win prizes . So exquisitely written and so beautiful . She is an immense talent, in the same class as Marilynne Robinson (Louise Doughty, BBC Saturday Review)

I was drawn into this marvellous debut by the exquisite writing, the characters and strong sense of place (Woman and Home)

Wood beautifully renders a landscape by turns rain-soaked and snow-laden, using it to suffuse her debut novel with a tense atmosphere of impending disaster. The author has a gift for capturing how humans are bound to and moulded by places (Sunday Times)

Wood's writing about landscape is vivid and original . Wood introduces some fresh metaphors that sparkle through the prose. This is a striking debut with a very strong sense of place and characters that grow and change as they come to terms with the past (Glasgow Herald)

Five stars . Wood has created a work as intricately detailed as one of the delicate pieces of jewellery that Pearl used to restore . Wood is a creator of worlds. This sodden river valley is one to savour (Daily Telegraph)

A lot of weather features in Lucy Wood's hotly tipped first novel . often exhilarating conjuring of landscape (Metro)

Prize-winning Lucy Wood's Diving Belles and Other Stories introduced a lyrical and distinctive voice and received rave reviews. Weathering, her first novel, weaves ever deeper connections between myth, fantasy and the everyday (Daily Mail)

Wood's 2012 short story collection Driving Belles was a magical thing that cast its spell from page one, holding the reader suspended in a delightful hazy cloud of Cornish fairytale dust until the end. Her debut novel Weathering has the same strong sense of place and otherworldliness (Big Issue)

Beautiful . The river and the house are wonderfully drawn and the voices of the characters, unforgettable (The Times)

Haunting . In luminous, lyrical prose, she tells the story of Ada, who's come to clear out her mother's house (Sunday Express)

Book Description:

From the critically acclaimed, award-winning author of Diving Belles: a beautifully bewitching novel of memories, mothers, ghosts and daughters

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