Drift: Winner of the Wales Book of the Year

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This is a tide which will fill the little cove near Nefyn’s house to the brim and signal it is time for Hamza’s sadness-inducing departure. 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. Indeed the sea is her true element and she seems somewhat stranded on land, where she lives in a clifftop cottage that has seen better days and needs a new roof. Hamza is a Syrian map-maker who escapes the custody of the army on the Welsh coast. He has seemingly been kept there as a consequence of extraordinary rendition, where prisoners are forcibly abducted from one country to another and has consequently been at the not-so-tender mercies of his gaolers, including one, Owens, who is straight from the sadistic wing of novelistic central casting,

This is a novel told via an omniscient narrative voice. The perspectives it takes cover not only Nefyn, Hamza, Joseph, Efa and Emrys – but also military personal who shuffle paper, forge records and neglect their wives. Such figures naturally fill an antagonistic role. Though their worlds are depicted without overt judgement or moral imposition, the pace of the novel means there is little time for enquiry into some fleeting moments of context (say, why a council estate upbringing has fed into calculating behaviour).The love between the two of them is just as powerful, both of them caught in a moment when they are connected to something bigger than themselves. It’s a feeling an old man called Emrys, who helps restore a boat to help Hamza escape knows full well, as he recalls a similarly seismic moment with his wife: THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE DEBUT FROM THREE-TIME WINNER OF WALES BOOK OF THE YEAR CARYL LEWIS: A STORY OF LOVE, MAGIC AND THE IRRESISTIBLE LURE OF THE SEA. Moving between the wild Welsh coast and war-torn Syria, Drift is a love story with a difference, a hypnotic tale of lost identity, the quest for home and the wondrous resilience of the human spirit.

Almost immediately, Nefyn and Hamza form an indelible connection. Hamza somehow makes the withdrawn Nefyn more confident. She'll do anything to protect him, including using her mysterious relationship with the sea to keep him safe. They used to think that each star had its own sphere, that each one circled the earth untouched and untouching... But stars, they collide, they move, are never fixed... Making them appear so makes us feel better, but they stray into each others' paths, feel the pull of others, and that's the wonder of it."A former map-maker, Hamza seems uniquely placed to discuss the topography of modern conflict, the greed behind it. In one of the book’s many moving passages, he tells Nefyn that the real horror of war is that it rubs out families, tradition, kindness, joy, making people’s lives invisible. Drift is a rare novel imbued with the lingering aura of the mythic story – a reminder that good writing can shine hope on even the darkest issues of grief and war. Lewis finely weaves her imaginings, expertly paced, until their intensity churns like a collapsing wave. In a culture awash with the plotless un-novel, it’s refreshing to see the folkloric blended with hard-nosed themes, persuasive proof that a novel need not be just one thing or another. For fans of THE LAMPLIGHTERS and EXIT WEST, the hauntingly atmospheric English-language debut from the acclaimed, multi-award-winning Welsh author: a mesmerising love story between a young Welsh woman and a Syrian mapmaker. In times of war, Lewis finds resilience, redemption and hope...DRIFT feels perfectly judged' OBSERVER

It’s a love story which burns as brightly as a candle, but starts guttering almost as soon as it is lit. I don't really know how to rate this novel. I read it on my commute to work which took me two hours because of unreliable public transport. I was transfixed by the thunderstorm around me and by the story unfolding in my mind when reading. "Drift" is about a peculiar, young, 'different' Welsh woman who finds an escaped military prisoner taken from Syria by the sea. The novel is a lot about secrets: Nefyn and her connection to the sea, her and Joseph's family history (what happened to their mother?), Hamza and how he became a prisoner off the Welsh coast, all of this is unchartered territory for both reader and characters meeting each other for the first time. Especially Nefyn is enigmatic, is she traumatised? Is she neurodivergent? Or none of that? As I said: I was fascinated. It's a story of being different and searching for that connection. The way others look at you and judge you without knowing the person. It centres around a small welsh village by the sea, and the life of twins, one boy, one girl, who live there. The girl is seen as different, she sees herself as different and has a deep connection with the sea and the natural world. You can't help but fall in love with her as you watch as her world changes when she rescues a stranger on the beach. I felt it with Efa, when we were young, that moment when you can’t love someone more. And I could feel inside me everyone who was alive and everyone who had ever lived who had felt that way. When she pulls the body of a military prisoner from the sea, she doesn't think twice about helping him. Hamza has been incarcerated for years, his name forgotten, after being falsely accused of helping to ambush British soldiers in Syria.Nefyn has always been an enigma, even to her brother Joseph with whom she lives in a small cottage above a blustery cove.

And it’s that slipping away that hurts the most when this emotional hand-grenade of a book deftly pulls out the pin, as briny waters claim their own and a lone man sets sail. It’s a sea that is a permanent, brooding character in this novel, just as there is something of the tide about Nefyn, ‘sometimes somehow close, within his grasp, but at other times slipping away.’Caryl Lewis, the author of that modern classic Martha, Jac a Sianco has long been considered one of the most accomplished writers in Wales but Drift seems altogether a step up, one is tempted to say a sea-change, given the assuredly confident way in which the quiet waves of her consistently clear and delightful prose carry the reader along. War casts its pall of shadow and gunsmoke over much of the book, ‘smothering everything,’ rubbing out ‘traditions, kindness, joy’ and making ‘people’s lives invisible.’ The clandestine camp where Hamza is being held is preparing drones to be shipped overseas, a soldierless way of waging war from the skies. Her brother, Joseph is an almost-twin, born virtually in the same breath of their mother Arianell, and he shares some sort of umbilical with her, often knowing what she is doing, or doing wrong, as when she sends a soldier hunting for Hamza walking into the sea and to his death.