| Vendor | |
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Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik |
| Original language | |
| English | |
THE RIVER WITHIN
A piercing and evocative literary novel centred on the lives of two women in 1950s Yorkshire.
On a summer's day in 1955, in the village of Starome, the body of young Danny Masters emerges from the river. It's found by Danny's three teenage friends: Alexander, the volatile heir to Richmond Hall, the country estate that neighbours Starome, and sister and brother, Lennie and Tom, whose father is secretary to the Richmond family. The friends' responses to Danny's death are strange. Why does Alexander seem oddly stimulated, excited even, and why is Lennie so keen for everyone to move on? How did Danny die? Did he fall in, or jump? Or worse?
In an interweaving narrative that moves across the months before and after Danny's death, the secrets of the village begin to unfold. Not just Lennie's troubled romance with Alexander, and her connection to Danny, but hidden truths within the Richmond family as well. Alexander's father, Angus, died the previous year - of cancer, it seemed - but something powerful and unspoken has fractured Alexander's relationship with his mother, Venetia. His uncle James meanwhile, is now never far from Venetia's side. As THE RIVER WITHIN takes us back further, to Venetia's youth in the 1930s, we see how much Alexander has never known about his parents' marriage, and of the time before it.
THE RIVER WITHIN is a wonderfully vivid and potent novel of true psychological depth, which explores how people's especially women's lives can be confined by the circumstances of their birth and the expectations of others. Lennie's own story is a clear-eyed look at the nature of romantic love, while Venetia's life has been centred upon marriage and motherhood. Both women's lives are shaped by the limitations of how their partners perceive them, and the enduring costs this has. It was Karen's elegant and measuredly lyrical prose that first drew me to the novel, but it is the depth of characterisation that caused me to fall in love with it, and the range of experience the novel captures: the portrait of the trials of early motherhood is one of the most powerful I've read. I believe that readers of Helen Dunmore, Sarah Dunant and Maggie O'Farrell will particularly enjoy THE RIVER WITHIN.
Karen Powell was born in Rochester, Kent, where she left school at sixteen before returning to education in her mid-twenties, to read English Literature at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. She lives in York with her family, and an early draft of THE RIVER WITHIN was awarded a Northern Writers' TLC New Fiction Prize. Thirteen years ago, two novels by Karen were published by tiny independent publisher Harbour Books in Essex, shortly after the company was founded. The novels were warmly reviewed by readers, but the new publisher's reach was limited, and rights in the titles have been reverted. Since that time, Karen juggled working full-time with the demands of raising young children, but THE RIVER WITHIN is a story that insistently demanded to be written, and marks a wonderful new chapter in Karen's writing career.
In an interweaving narrative that moves across the months before and after Danny's death, the secrets of the village begin to unfold. Not just Lennie's troubled romance with Alexander, and her connection to Danny, but hidden truths within the Richmond family as well. Alexander's father, Angus, died the previous year - of cancer, it seemed - but something powerful and unspoken has fractured Alexander's relationship with his mother, Venetia. His uncle James meanwhile, is now never far from Venetia's side. As THE RIVER WITHIN takes us back further, to Venetia's youth in the 1930s, we see how much Alexander has never known about his parents' marriage, and of the time before it.
THE RIVER WITHIN is a wonderfully vivid and potent novel of true psychological depth, which explores how people's especially women's lives can be confined by the circumstances of their birth and the expectations of others. Lennie's own story is a clear-eyed look at the nature of romantic love, while Venetia's life has been centred upon marriage and motherhood. Both women's lives are shaped by the limitations of how their partners perceive them, and the enduring costs this has. It was Karen's elegant and measuredly lyrical prose that first drew me to the novel, but it is the depth of characterisation that caused me to fall in love with it, and the range of experience the novel captures: the portrait of the trials of early motherhood is one of the most powerful I've read. I believe that readers of Helen Dunmore, Sarah Dunant and Maggie O'Farrell will particularly enjoy THE RIVER WITHIN.
Karen Powell was born in Rochester, Kent, where she left school at sixteen before returning to education in her mid-twenties, to read English Literature at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. She lives in York with her family, and an early draft of THE RIVER WITHIN was awarded a Northern Writers' TLC New Fiction Prize. Thirteen years ago, two novels by Karen were published by tiny independent publisher Harbour Books in Essex, shortly after the company was founded. The novels were warmly reviewed by readers, but the new publisher's reach was limited, and rights in the titles have been reverted. Since that time, Karen juggled working full-time with the demands of raising young children, but THE RIVER WITHIN is a story that insistently demanded to be written, and marks a wonderful new chapter in Karen's writing career.
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Book
Published 2020-09-01 by Europa Editions |