Christopher Hart

Flooding the Valley

Gathering the Water

By

Doubleday 250pp £14.99 order from our bookshop

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.’

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'The erecting and immediate destruction of a series of straw men rather detracts from what is for the most part an… ,
    • RT : A magnificent demolition job on this "acid laced tirade...unpleasantly self-obsessed...self pitying polemic...book… ,
    • 'Seventy years on, the time we have left to gather such first-hand testimony is running out.' John Keay on the sig… ,
    • The author 'seethes with contemptuous indignation at the shiny junk that an unregulated construction industry dumps… ,
    • 'The physical courage he demonstrated as a young man [...] gave way to intellectual power; radical thought, gifted… ,
    • 'While Jane Austen didn’t perhaps achieve the full recognition that she deserved in her lifetime, even then she out… ,
    • 'All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And t… ,
    Follow Us