Drift: Winner of the Wales Book of the Year

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So the Welsh version and the English version will be published on the same day, one with Macmillan and one with a small Welsh publisher, so the children who have read my work before can have the choice of Welsh or English. She was raised in Aberaeron before moving at the age of twelve to her family's farm in the parish of Dihewyd. And bit by bit, it becomes apparent that Nefyn inherited supernatural powers from her mother, who ‘belonged to the sea’ and disappeared when Nefyn and Joseph were very young. So yes, it was based on somewhere I know very well, that has lots of stories and language and folklore attached to it. 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.

If you continue on there are quite timely villages along the way with a good stretch in between, and you could of course go to New Quay, Cei Newydd. With recent refugee crises arising from conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan and most recently Ukraine (amongst others), Drift’s themes of war and displacement feel all too timely.

I liked the setting and the characters in this book, drawn with a lyrical style which was lovely to read. Joseph is deeply conflicted, and he has somehow conflated preservation with protecting and stifling, he can’t see the difference. At the heart of this shimmering marvel of a book sits an unexpected relationship, a brief, intense love affair between highly unusual lovers whose lives drift together like sea-wrack. It is then that Nefyn’s true nature begins to flourish, as readers learn of her attachment to the sea and how deep it really goes. There are many disparate stories of mermaids in Welsh, including the one from near Llangrannog which I drew on.

The significance of this becomes even more profound when contemplating the environmental crisis the world is experiencing currently. There are magic realism elements to the story – which is usually a hard no for me - but they really work in this instance. There are scrapes and difficulties, but these escapades are less about Lowe and more about the kindness of others, encouraged by the disarming quality of “the machine which makes us all brothers and sisters”. A past struggle with infertility has left Efa yearning to provide maternal support to the pair who were orphaned by a absconded mother and drowned father. I think we’re encouraged to think in broad strokes, to pull back and make generalisations about peoples.The Wales Book of the Year Award is an annual prize hosted by Literature Wales to celebrate literary talent from Wales across many genres and in both English and Welsh.

She is an initial enigma, suppressed in some strange way, until a sort of catharsis occurs after she finds a gravely injured man washed up on the shore, seemingly out of the blue.Their relationship is a coming together of perspectives, of cultures: “She tried to secure the tone of his eyes in her mind, he tried to etch the angles of her body into his, and together they made a map. 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. In expert strokes, Lewis conjures a pallid and monochrome world where rain needles and waves crash – the sea seizing “the foolish, the reckless and the unlucky”. There’s quite a claustrophobic feel to the novel in many ways, and as you said, with the cottage almost falling into the sea, it’s a sense of cultures on the edge, pushed up to the edge, and you’ll find Welsh-speaking communities quite often pushed up against the side of the sea. Caryl: My mother was a singer, so when I was younger I spent a lot of time with my grandmothers who lived near Llangrannog, which is a beautiful, beautiful stretch of coastline in West Wales, and along the coast from Llangrannog at Aberporth is an Army base which tests munitions for use in conflict abroad.

She is a young woman who has inexplicable powers, such as being able to generate a storm at will, or dive to any depth of sea-water, as she does when rescuing . In a culture awash with the plotless un-novel, it’s refreshing to see the folkloric blended with hard-nosed themes, persuasive proof that a novel need not be just one thing or another. A definite 5⭐️ read, which I’ll be recommending to anyone who’ll listen, it would make a great book club pick because I’m just bursting to talk about it! There are also collisions of culture, and gender, as gravity also creates attraction and opposites pull together.If you walk out at Borth at a certain tide time and a certain time of year, you can see the petrified forest out there.