The River

The lives lived and lost along the banks of the river in the English village of Cameldip are cut together like a deck of cards. Those who have lived there longest know how their neighbors have connected and formed patterns with each other and then have been reshuffled by tragedy or time. But Anna, a newcomer to the village, must work it out--and she really must, as the doyenne of the village who takes her in, apparently out of the goodness of her heart, changes in disturbing ways after Anna's baby is born. Kate Reading's work here is immensely skillful; she peoples this stunning story with breathing characters of all ages and stations, and with accents bred from the Scottish Isles to Provence. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

March 28, 2005
This eerie first novel plumbs the dark undercurrents of the sleepy English town of Cameldip, where two children drown in 1958, and the grief of their death ripples through generations of its inhabitants. In chapters alternating between the year of the drowning, the parents' lives before the accident and a season 30 years later, Wastvedt brings the players to life: Isabel, who can't make peace with the death of her two children; her husband, Robert, whose rejection by Isabel leads him to Sarah, a young maid; Josef, the drowned children's playmate who grows up with survivor's guilt; and Anna, who comes to Cameldip from London in the 1980s to have her baby out of wedlock. The chapters set in the late 1940s have a lovely, elegiac feel, which makes an effective contrast to the chapters set later, when Wastvedt slowly ratchets up the sense of dread. Then, a teenage crush threatens Josef and Anna's tentative relationship, the patter of small, ghostly feet haunts the town, and Isabel's implacable grief veers toward madness as she takes possession of Anna's son. Though the characters' nostalgia can be frustrating, this suspenseful, atmospheric story progresses with the irresistible flow of the river itself, and readers may find themselves pulled in right up to the ghastly ending. Agent, Jean Naggar.