Drift: Winner of the Wales Book of the Year

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Drift: Winner of the Wales Book of the Year

Drift: Winner of the Wales Book of the Year

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Lewis finely weaves her imaginings, expertly paced, until their intensity churns like a collapsing wave. Drift is a rare novel imbued with the lingering aura of the mythic story – a reminder that good writing can shine hope on even the darkest issues of grief and war. But it’s Nefyn’s intervention that gives Hamza a new chance, so is Joseph’s thinking flawed in that respect? Literature Wales is grateful for the support of the award’s sponsors and partners: Arts Council of Wales, Welsh Government, The Rhys Davies Trust, Books Council of Wales, Wales Arts Review, Golwg360 and BBC Cymru Wales .

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE DEBUT FROM TWO-TIME WINNER OF WALES BOOK OF THE YEAR CARYL LEWIS: A STORY OF LOVE, MAGIC AND THE IRRESISTIBLE LURE OF THE SEA.To walk with a man who tries not to forget his roots, a brother whose shoulders have been carrying a heavy burden, a wife who protects the children entrusted to her and her husband who struggles to meet his end with dignity. The love between the two of them is just as powerful, both of them caught in a moment when they are connected to something bigger than themselves.

The novels claiming the overall prizes this year are both unique, yet they are linked by their sense of place; their magical words are rooted in specific Welsh landscapes. Drift, her first novel in English, is the story of how two people, two languages and two cultures can be a source of love, not friction.

And it’s that slipping away that hurts the most when this emotional hand-grenade of a book deftly pulls out the pin, as briny waters claim their own and a lone man sets sail.

There are magic realism elements to the story – which is usually a hard no for me - but they really work in this instance. A tender, unusual and gorgeously wrought love story t hat weaves the magic of folk lore, the wonder of the sea, and the depths of human cruelty. This storyline is delineated in remarkably few strokes, the pain of dementia a sad echo of an earlier pain in the marriage, namely infertility, where “their failure had turned to sadness, and sadness to silence”.It is a startling, apposite metaphor, a good example of Lewis’s attentive prose style, that also works to summarise the novel’s dramatic tension, the opposition of nature and manmade violence, the great clash that will play out over the course of the narrative. The introduction of Nefyn’s abilities is as gradual as a tidal shift, the strangeness of Nefyn, her unnerving stillness, makes these subtle changes easier to swallow in a novel which is – for the most part – starkly real. He didn’t question it, he just said, “Well this is where we live, this is where I am now, and this is the language that will connect me to the people and to the landscape,” and he just learnt the language and speaks it fluently.

The elements of magical realism may not be to everyone’s taste, but the strength of Lewis’s writing means that she carries them off with panache.

He even tells Hamza, ‘“Scum like you should be stamped out,”’ implying he sees the refugee as comparable to a bug or an infectious disease. In a year in which the Welsh-language overall prize was won by Llŷr Titus for his novel Pridd (Gwasg y Bwthyn), Clare Furlough, representative of the prize’s organisers Literature Wales stated, ‘The novels claiming the overall prizes this year are both unique but are linked by their sense of place; their magical words are rooted in specific Welsh landscapes.



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