“Riverflow” is Alison Layland’s second novel and is “a novel of family secrets, community tensions and environmental protest against a background of fracking and floods on the River Severn”, to quote from the Booka Bookshop website. It addresses climate change, one of the pressing issues of our time, reminding readers of how frighteningly close we have come to destroying nature and the planet for good.
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| “Riverflow” reminds readers of how frighteningly close we have come to destroying nature and the planet for good |
While many of us translators like to think of ourselves as writers, Alison Layland is a real writer in that she’s both a translator (who translates from German, French and Welsh into English) and a talented and successful novelist. I met Alison at a Twitter workshop in Birmingham in 2015. You can find a short blog entry about her debut novel, “Someone Else’s Conflict”, here.
As I think I’ve mentioned before, I get bored by novels very quickly. I’ve lost track of the number of novels which I started reading, only to put them down again to either do something more exciting or read something much more useful (as you may remember, I’m a non-fiction translator).
So whenever I do read a novel from beginning to end, this must mean something! “Riverflow” with its haunting plot pulled me right in and kept my attention. Alison’s writing style also appeals to me: it’s engaging, original and comfortable to read. And the language she uses is very modern in that it features words like “ecocide” and “upcycling”.
“Riverflow” was chosen as Welsh Book of the Month for August 2019 by Waterstones. You can watch the book trailer here:
I warmly and enthusiastically recommend this book by @AlisonLayland! New on my blog: https://t.co/vdYCrqs4fh @honno @Waterstones @WaterstonesAber @nightlightcandl @theprimewriters— The minimalist translator (@detransferendo) April 13, 2020
