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Review
"A novel of rare insight, exquisitely written. A standing ovation for this debut." -- Michael Morpurgo
From the Author
The idea for `A Mile of River' started with a strange dream in which I saw a girl walking barefoot through a cinder car park. Her feet were bleeding and in the dream I knew that she had been driven to these lengths because her father had taken her shoes and hidden them. This scene kept coming back to my mind and I knew that I wanted to find out more about it. Having taught `A' levels for many years, I had known many students who had huge drive and aspirations but were dealing with difficult home lives and I wondered whether the girl in the dream was a kind of imagined archetype.
During that summer there was a very hot spell and my mind flew back to the summer of 1976 when no rain fell in the Midlands for a hundred days. What would it have been like trying to keep a farm going then, I wondered, with your livelihood drying up around you? And what effect would it have on a farming family, where even the kids were expected to pull their weight: especially a family with only one parent around? My heroine, Jess, a determined seventeen year old and her young brother, Tom, their absent mother, Sylvie, and their controlling father, Henry, were born.
Henry wants Jess to forget about her mother and to dedicate herself to a life spent working on the farm but Jess is growing up and has ideas of her own; she wants to find her mother, to escape to university, to find out what love is. The conflict between Jess and her father builds as the farm sinks into deeper and deeper trouble and Henry, unable to control the weather, tightens his control where he can: on his family.
Jess finds her mother's bird book, and alongside the entries about kingfishers and fieldfares she re-discovers memories and starts to unravel secrets. She begins to question her father's version of the past and kick against his version of her future. Against the background of a scorching summer that is drying up the river, the very lifeblood of the farm, Jess struggles to decide who she is, her mother's or her father's daughter.
The book is set in the heartland of the rural Midlands, a terrain that I know and love, and this allowed me to use the same close observation that I attempt in my poetry for the drawing of the countryside and the farming life. I hope that this has produced a lyrical style and that while there is a strong sense of the seventies in the scenes set in the wider world: a fairground, the picture-house, a school dance; there is also a timeless quality about the farm which has been in the family's hands for centuries.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
During that summer there was a very hot spell and my mind flew back to the summer of 1976 when no rain fell in the Midlands for a hundred days. What would it have been like trying to keep a farm going then, I wondered, with your livelihood drying up around you? And what effect would it have on a farming family, where even the kids were expected to pull their weight: especially a family with only one parent around? My heroine, Jess, a determined seventeen year old and her young brother, Tom, their absent mother, Sylvie, and their controlling father, Henry, were born.
Henry wants Jess to forget about her mother and to dedicate herself to a life spent working on the farm but Jess is growing up and has ideas of her own; she wants to find her mother, to escape to university, to find out what love is. The conflict between Jess and her father builds as the farm sinks into deeper and deeper trouble and Henry, unable to control the weather, tightens his control where he can: on his family.
Jess finds her mother's bird book, and alongside the entries about kingfishers and fieldfares she re-discovers memories and starts to unravel secrets. She begins to question her father's version of the past and kick against his version of her future. Against the background of a scorching summer that is drying up the river, the very lifeblood of the farm, Jess struggles to decide who she is, her mother's or her father's daughter.
The book is set in the heartland of the rural Midlands, a terrain that I know and love, and this allowed me to use the same close observation that I attempt in my poetry for the drawing of the countryside and the farming life. I hope that this has produced a lyrical style and that while there is a strong sense of the seventies in the scenes set in the wider world: a fairground, the picture-house, a school dance; there is also a timeless quality about the farm which has been in the family's hands for centuries.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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