Drift: Winner of the Wales Book of the Year

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A freak landslide, when Hamza is being moved from the camp by lorry, washes him into the sea, from which he is rescued by Nefyn. 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 . 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. Nefyn has always been an enigma, even to her brother Joseph with whom she lives in a small cottage above a blustery cove.

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. 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. Lewis finely weaves her imaginings, expertly paced, until their intensity churns like a collapsing wave. 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.

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.’ 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. Caryl Lewis, the author of that modern classic Martha, Jac a Sianco has long been considered one of the most accomplished writers in Wales but Drift seems altogether a step up, one is tempted to say a sea-change, given the assuredly confident way in which the quiet waves of her consistently clear and delightful prose carry the reader along. It's a story of being different and searching for that connection. The way others look at you and judge you without knowing the person. It centres around a small welsh village by the sea, and the life of twins, one boy, one girl, who live there. The girl is seen as different, she sees herself as different and has a deep connection with the sea and the natural world. You can't help but fall in love with her as you watch as her world changes when she rescues a stranger on the beach. 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.

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." This is a tide which will fill the little cove near Nefyn’s house to the brim and signal it is time for Hamza’s sadness-inducing departure. 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.

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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). 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. 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.’ It’s a love story which burns as brightly as a candle, but starts guttering almost as soon as it is lit. War casts its pall of shadow and gunsmoke over much of the book, ‘smothering everything,’ rubbing out ‘traditions, kindness, joy’ and making ‘people’s lives invisible.’ The clandestine camp where Hamza is being held is preparing drones to be shipped overseas, a soldierless way of waging war from the skies.

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. 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. The following events naturally conspire towards a plan to get Hamza home. Though his wife is dead, and the whereabouts of his son unknown, the persistence of hope in desperate circumstance is a central thematic concern throughout Drift. And so, too, is love. The romantic relationship which grows between Hamza and Nefyn is quiet but insistent, the eventual fact of its arrival seeming more inevitable than it might in summary. 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.”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. A violent storm will bring these two lost souls together - but other forces will soon try to tear them apart... 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: