This is the sixteenth novel from the critically acclaimed Robert Edric, a novelist who has never quite made it into the lists of prize-winners and big names. Gathering the Water marks a return to the type of novel for which he is best known: the literary-historical type. Set in the last months of 1848, it concerns the grandiose plan to flood the Forge Valley in Yorkshire, creating a new dam and reservoir. Along with this creation will go, necessarily, the destruction of an ancient village and the eviction of its sullen, almost medieval inhabitants. It is a place of ‘thirty smoking chimneys – signifying what? A hundred, two hundred people.’

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