Drift: Winner of the Wales Book of the Year

Product Information

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.

Moving between the wild Welsh coast and war-torn Syria, Drift is a love story with a difference, and a hypnotic tale of lost identity, the quest for home and the wondrous resilience of the human spirit. And to be present in conversations, to be visible in conversations I think is important as we develop as a nation.There is the occasional clang of something culturally familiar (a scene where Nefyn tells a prison guard to walk into the sea feels a little akin to Jedi mind tricks). It is the magic and mystery that Lewis intertwines with this element that make her novel an assured page-turner, leaving readers with such a strong yet simple message – nature innately aligns itself with us, and we should let it.

So the Welsh version and the English version will be published on the same day, one with Macmillan and one with a small Welsh publisher, so the children who have read my work before can have the choice of Welsh or English. Lewis mainly uses the military, the story’s antagonist, to explore how roughly refugees such as Hamza are handled and regarded.

There are many disparate stories of mermaids in Welsh, including the one from near Llangrannog which I drew on. 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. There are also shades of Donal Ryan’s From a Low and Quiet Sea and Sarah Hall’s recent novel Burntcoat, which had an immigrant love story at its centre. For those who are unfamiliar with Celtic myths of undersea people, one may prefer it if the author explicitly stated whether Arianell was a mermaid or a selkie.