Drift: Winner of the Wales Book of the Year

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And I could feel inside me everyone who was alive and everyone who had ever lived who had felt that way. Yet, with the local military base after Hamza, and Nefyn being of half land and half sea, can they find a way to stay together, or will larger outside forces tear them apart when the candle’s barely been lit? Moved and moved so that he had become so far removed from where he had been, who he had been, that he no longer knew himself. A tender, unusual and gorgeously wrought love story’ RACHEL JOYCE Purchase this product now and earn 37 Points! If you love magical realism, and, like me, are always on the lookout for more books set in Wales, then this is a book to add to your TBR list.

I’m a beekeeper, my daughter who’s ten keeps bees as well, so there’s an exciting project on the way there. A definite 5⭐️ read, which I’ll be recommending to anyone who’ll listen, it would make a great book club pick because I’m just bursting to talk about it!Drift by Caryl Lewis was awarded the overall prize in English in the Wales Book of the Year yesterday (13 July 2023). The news was announced at an award ceremony held at The Tramshed, Cardiff, and led by Ffion Dafis, last year’s winner of the overall award in the Welsh Language. It centres around a small welsh village by the sea, and the life of twins, one boy, one girl, who live there.

And the wind would worry it until the weaves and the swell would make the whole world feel as if it were moving.A definite 5⭐️ read, which I’ll be recommending to anyone who’ll listen 😂 it would make a great book club pick because I’m just bursting to talk about it!

It is impossible not to be drawn into the writing, which contains so much atmosphere that it fills your imagination long after you've finished it. Lewis tells the story of multiple characters, but the central focus of Drift is on Nefyn, a young Welsh woman with mysterious powers who finds the body of a Syrian refugee, Hamza, washed ashore after the storm.

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. We are pleased that, year-on-year, Wales Book of the Year demonstrates the wealth of literary talent in and from Wales. I didn’t know anything about the story when I picked this up and honestly I think that’s a good way to approach it. So what we have in this tale is a modern myth cast with a timely urgency, and a clever inversion of the sadly familiar story of a refugee wanting to arrive in a new country.

And similarly, and this is a strange thing for me, the middle-grade book that will be out next month has been translated into Welsh by my Welsh-language editor. Early sections show the reader the brutality of prison life, where the casual violence of the guards and the hopelessness borne out of years of stasis, the endless purgatory, ultimately cause Hamza to go on hunger strike. To see how the myths of the selkies and the legend of the goddess Atargatis are wed to a love against the world and a firm need to fulfil your destiny.

To witness how Folklore dances along with issues that concern us all: racism, cruelty, loss, the daily struggle to survive. The winning book is Lewis’ debut novel in the English language, and moves between the Welsh coast and Syria.