DEBUT FICTION ELIZABETH BUCHAN

WEATHERING

by Lucy Wood

(Bloomsbury £16.99)

PRIZE-WINNING Lucy Wood’s Diving Belles And Other Stories introduced a lyrical and distinctive voice and received rave reviews.

Weathering, her first novel, weaves ever deeper connections between myth, fantasy and the everyday.

Obsessed as she is by the river, Pearl cannot understand why she has ended up in it. Is she alive or dead? Despite her efforts to escape, Pearl’s daughter Ada is alarmed to find herself summoned back to Pearl’s remote riverside cottage with only her own daughter, Pepper, for a companion.

A damp autumn is followed by howling winter and, walled in by the weather and — apparently — by ghosts, Ada and Pepper struggle to keep warm and fed.

Stumbling over the reminders of Pearl in the house, it seems that past and present have collided and the spirits of the river are exerting their power over them, too.

Surrender to this and it is an immersive read, bewitchingly imagined and written.

IF I FALL, IF I DIE

by Michael Christie

(Heineman £14.99)

IF YOU fancy a coming- of-age story — with skateboarding — Michael Christie’s If I Fall, If I Die will probably do the trick. Family tragedies have turned former filmmaker Diana Cardiel severely agoraphobic. Holed up in her house in a small Canadian town, she has named each room after an exotic locale.

Forbidding Will, her son, to venture into the dangerous outside, she makes the mistake of leaving him to deal with the food deliveries. It is a chink in their hermetic existence which permits Will to make contact with a boy who introduces him to skateboarding.

Suddenly, escape from this trapped and frozen existence seems possible.

If you accept the premise of a mother and child walled up literally by fear and fatalism, then the skateboard as a metaphor for freedom is an intriguing one, and Diana’s ‘ black lagoon’ is all too recognisable a mental state.

But the prose is occasionally clotted and overwrought.