Christopher Hart
Flooding the Valley
Gathering the Water
By Robert Edric
Doubleday 250pp £14.99
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.’
This laconic, apparently passionless narrator is Charles Weightman, surveyor and overseer of the new dam, stationed in the Forge Valley in its last, bleak, dying days, and gradually coming to know its inhabitants. Or not, as the case may be. The most mysterious, and in some ways most attractive and
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Princess Diana was adored and scorned, idolised, canonised and chastised.
Why, asks @NshShulman, was everyone mad about Diana?
Find out in the May issue of Literary Review, out now.
Literary Review - For People Who Devour Books
In the Current Issue: Nicola Shulman on Princess Diana * Sophie Oliver on Gertrude Stein * Costica Bradatan on P...
literaryreview.co.uk
Under its longest-serving editor, Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair was that rare thing – a New York society magazine that published serious journalism.
@PeterPeteryork looks at what Carter got right.
Peter York - Deluxe Editions
Peter York: Deluxe Editions - When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines by Graydon Carter
literaryreview.co.uk
Henry James returned to America in 1904 with three objectives: to see his brother William, to deliver a series of lectures on Balzac, and to gather material for a pair of books about modern America.
Peter Rose follows James out west.
Peter Rose - The Restless Analyst
Peter Rose: The Restless Analyst - Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age by Peter Brooks...
literaryreview.co.uk