Drift: Winner of the Wales Book of the Year

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A violent storm will bring these two lost souls together - but other forces will soon try to tear them apart... 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. It’s a sea that is a permanent, brooding character in this novel, just as there is something of the tide about Nefyn, ‘sometimes somehow close, within his grasp, but at other times slipping away.’

A former map-maker, Hamza seems uniquely placed to discuss the topography of modern conflict, the greed behind it. In one of the book’s many moving passages, he tells Nefyn that the real horror of war is that it rubs out families, tradition, kindness, joy, making people’s lives invisible. Nefyn has always been different. Even her twin brother, Joseph doesn't understand her. Because there is something peculiar about her deep connection to the sea on the Welsh coast, something otherworldly and magical: "We're all just a collection of things. Brought together by the sea. Torn apart." Another issue was that I never fully connected with Nefyn and Hamza as characters, and the book felt too short to properly develop a convincing romance. I was more invested in Efa and Emry's story, and even Joseph came across as a deeper character with more engaging complexities. In addition, there was never any real sense of threat from the external forces supposedly trying to tear Nefyn and Hamza apart. What I assume were written to be scenes of epic romance, nail-biting danger, and amazing feats of power evoked only a detached interest. Almost immediately, Nefyn and Hamza form an indelible connection. Hamza somehow makes the withdrawn Nefyn more confident. She'll do anything to protect him, including using her mysterious relationship with the sea to keep him safe.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. When she pulls the body of a military prisoner from the sea, she doesn't think twice about helping him. Hamza has been incarcerated for years, his name forgotten, after being falsely accused of helping to ambush British soldiers in Syria. I don't really know how to rate this novel. I read it on my commute to work which took me two hours because of unreliable public transport. I was transfixed by the thunderstorm around me and by the story unfolding in my mind when reading. "Drift" is about a peculiar, young, 'different' Welsh woman who finds an escaped military prisoner taken from Syria by the sea. The novel is a lot about secrets: Nefyn and her connection to the sea, her and Joseph's family history (what happened to their mother?), Hamza and how he became a prisoner off the Welsh coast, all of this is unchartered territory for both reader and characters meeting each other for the first time. Especially Nefyn is enigmatic, is she traumatised? Is she neurodivergent? Or none of that? As I said: I was fascinated. Indeed the sea is her true element and she seems somewhat stranded on land, where she lives in a clifftop cottage that has seen better days and needs a new roof. They used to think that each star had its own sphere, that each one circled the earth untouched and untouching... But stars, they collide, they move, are never fixed... Making them appear so makes us feel better, but they stray into each others' paths, feel the pull of others, and that's the wonder of it."

There is a mythic quality to the novel, both in the heroism of ordinary people in the face of power, and the character of Nefyn, with her folkloric affinity to the sea. These mysteries are revealed slowly and delicately, lending them credibility. Nefyn’s powers are initially underplayed, in a way that makes them strangely believable. Other books that come to mind are How Saints Die by Carmen Marcus and the surreal stories of the Scottish writer Kirsty Logan, who uses myth to great effect in her fiction. There are also shades of Donal Ryan’s From a Low and Quiet Sea and Sarah Hall’s recent novel Burntcoat, which had an immigrant love story at its centre. I felt it with Efa, when we were young, that moment when you can’t love someone more. And I could feel inside me everyone who was alive and everyone who had ever lived who had felt that way.It’s a love story which burns as brightly as a candle, but starts guttering almost as soon as it is lit. He writes letters home in case he himself never makes it whilst waiting for the Perigean tide which comes only three or four times a year, when the moon leaves its apogee and bows ‘to take a closer look at Earth.’ 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. It’s a feeling an old man called Emrys, who helps restore a boat to help Hamza escape knows full well, as he recalls a similarly seismic moment with his wife: THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE DEBUT FROM THREE-TIME WINNER OF WALES BOOK OF THE YEAR CARYL LEWIS: A STORY OF LOVE, MAGIC AND THE IRRESISTIBLE LURE OF THE SEA.

For fans of THE LAMPLIGHTERS and EXIT WEST, the hauntingly atmospheric English-language debut from the acclaimed, multi-award-winning Welsh author: a mesmerising love story between a young Welsh woman and a Syrian mapmaker. But I immensely disliked the love story as the relationship felt so very unequal at first. Experienced middle aged man, father to a son, uprooted from Syria and a girl who has never left the hamlet she grew up with or the house she was born in. While Nefyn has agency and a voice, I disliked the ending still, even though it was to be expected, the book having turned into that kind of story with folklore. But I also liked the ending. I also hated Owen, I hated the military people in general and I did not enjoy the chapters told from their point of view. Efa was a nice character and her husband's dementia also broke my heart, but I felt she was somewhat less fleshed out than the other characters.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. Lewis switches narrative perspectives with ease and the various subplots are woven skilfully together. Moving between the wild Welsh coast and war-torn Syria, Drift is a love story with a difference, a hypnotic tale of lost identity, the quest for home and the wondrous resilience of the human spirit. This is a novel told via an omniscient narrative voice. The perspectives it takes cover not only Nefyn, Hamza, Joseph, Efa and Emrys – but also military personal who shuffle paper, forge records and neglect their wives. Such figures naturally fill an antagonistic role. Though their worlds are depicted without overt judgement or moral imposition, the pace of the novel means there is little time for enquiry into some fleeting moments of context (say, why a council estate upbringing has fed into calculating behaviour).