Gathering The Water
  • Published: 1 December 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409032465
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

Gathering The Water

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Dec 2010
Paperback
1 Oct 2007
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The stunning novel by the Booker longlisted author of Peacetime

It is 1847, northern England, and Charles Weightman has been given the unenviable task of overseeing the flooding of the Forge Valley and evicting its lingering inhabitants. Weightman is heartily resented by these locals, and he himself is increasingly unconvinced both of the wisdom of his appointment and of the integrity and motives of the company men who posted him there. He finds some solace, however, in his enigmatic neighbour, Mary Latimer. Caring for her mad sister, Mary is also an outsider, and a companionship develops between the two of them which offers them both some comfort and support in their mutual isolation.

As winter closes steadily in and as the waters begin to rise in the Forge Valley, it becomes increasingly evident that the man-made deluge cannot be avoided; not by the locals desperate to save their homes, nor by the reluctant agent of their destruction, Weightman himself.

In a masterful new novel, Edric captures powerful human emotions with grace and precision. The hauntingly resonant backdrop to this story of David and Goliath marks Edric's dramatic return to historical literary fiction.
  • Published: 1 December 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409032465
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288
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About the author

Robert Edric

Robert Edric was born in 1956. His novels include Winter Garden (James Tait Black Prize winner 1986), A New Ice Age (runner-up for the Guardian Fiction Prize 1986), The Book of the Heathen (winner of the WH Smith LIterary Award 2000), Peacetime (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2002), Gathering the Water (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2006) and In Zodiac Light (shortlisted for the Dublin Impac Prize 2010). His most recent novel is Sanctuary. He lives in Yorkshire.

Also by Robert Edric

Mercury Falling
Field Service
Sanctuary
The Monster's Lament
The Devil's Beat
The London Satyr
Salvage
See all

Praise for Gathering The Water

A compelling story ......Robert Edric writes with a steady rhythm that, like the flow of the diverted dam waters, fills in a picture of horror and loss with a sustained and unrelenting force.

TLS

Gathering the Water belongs with a group of his (Edric's) novels whose artistry and resonance constitute one of the most astonishing bodies of work to appear from a single author for a generation.

Daily Telegraph

Gathering the Water is a small novel but one that packs a mighty punch. Stylistically it is superb .....above all though, it is in his marshalling of his themes that Edric proves himself such an accomplished novelist. At one level a book about loss and guilt, loyalty and ambition, madness and reality, Gathering the Water in fact ranges even further in its concerns, contrasting the immutability of nature with the similarly crushing immutability of money and business ........a power-packed, stunningly crafted novel.

Sunday Times

Gathering the Water is an admirably serious novel, written in prose as spare as its setting. Its lament for the death of the community is subtle and powerful.

Daily Mail

Booker judges take note.

Guardian