Drift: Winner of the Wales Book of the Year

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Original and timely… show[s] the resilience of the human spirit, the tenacity and love that helps us survive. I don’t like people looking over my shoulder when I’m writing, and I will not do it to other people. While Nefyn has agency and a voice, I disliked the ending still, even though it was to be expected, the book having turned into that kind of story with folklore. An intimate read- I could imagine this being a made into an ITV drama or staged beautifully as a play. The hauntingly atmospheric English-language début from the acclaimed Welsh author: a love story between a young Welsh woman and a Syrian mapmaker, rich with magic, mystery and the wonder of the sea.

Then when I turned 40 I had a little bit of a crisis, and I decided – because I have written a lot, and I started writing quite young – I wanted to find what else I could do. Some of the other characters were perhaps less well drawn, or maybe the narrative just had too many perspectives - a local couple, army officers, Nefyn’s brother. There are scrapes and difficulties, but these escapades are less about Lowe and more about the kindness of others, encouraged by the disarming quality of “the machine which makes us all brothers and sisters”.

While the sea is a crucial motif, and fisherman masculinity is of particular interest when discussing Joseph’s character, there is not enough space for them here. The rescued castaway who bears witness to this turns out to be a Syrian mapmaker who has suffered immense loss at the hands of the Syrian civil war, and who finds solace in the connection that he and Nefyn share.

Hamza’s story actually sprang from me visiting a very high-percentage Welsh-speaking town, and hearing a man speaking Welsh with a really distinctive accent.THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE DEBUT FROM TWO-TIME WINNER OF WALES BOOK OF THE YEAR CARYL LEWIS: A STORY OF LOVE, MAGIC AND THE IRRESISTIBLE LURE OF THE SEA. And then north of Llangrannog there’s Cwmtydu, which is a place I used to be taken a lot, it’s almost like the cove in Drift, it has steep rises, there’s an old lime kiln just at the back of the beach, and there are just so many stories there. Another issue was that I never fully connected with Nefyn and Hamza as characters, and the book felt too short to properly develop a convincing romance. I felt it was more of a young adult novel and I wasn't quite convinced by the Syrian aspect of the story - perhaps as a campaigner for Syria I am more likely to be critical than other readers. Joseph is deeply conflicted, and he has somehow conflated preservation with protecting and stifling, he can’t see the difference.