The River is The River

Description

A woman named Naomi arrives at her sister's house, intending, it seems, to say goodbye. She is abandoning her city life for a remote Scottish retreat, which she will share with a man called Bern.t, whom she considers some kind of visionary. In a sequence of stories filtered through multiple re-tellings, she illuminates the character of this elusive individual. One story seems of special significance: about Afonso, an Amazon boatman, who could be the last speaker of his mother tongue, a language of apparently unique simplicity and precision. Bernat and Naomi are not, however, the only storytellers here. Naomi's sister, Kate, is herself working on a novel that begins as a ghost story, but ends up as something rather different: The river is the river.

Jonathan Buckley is the highly-praised author of Telescope, So He Takes the Dog and Nostalgia. The river is the river is his ninth novel. He lives in Hove.

Praise for Jonathan Buckley's Nostalgia 'As good as anything by the dozen or so big brand names of contemporary Eng Lit. -- Ian Sansom * Guardian *