Drift: Winner of the Wales Book of the Year

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The following events naturally conspire towards a plan to get Hamza home. Though his wife is dead, and the whereabouts of his son unknown, the persistence of hope in desperate circumstance is a central thematic concern throughout Drift. And so, too, is love. The romantic relationship which grows between Hamza and Nefyn is quiet but insistent, the eventual fact of its arrival seeming more inevitable than it might in summary. Their relationship is a coming together of perspectives, of cultures: “She tried to secure the tone of his eyes in her mind, he tried to etch the angles of her body into his, and together they made a map.” 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.’ 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. Nefyn has always been an enigma, even to her brother Joseph with whom she lives in a small cottage above a blustery cove.

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). 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. Nefyn has always been different. Even her twin brother, Joseph doesn't understand her. Because there is something peculiar about her deep connection to the sea on the Welsh coast, something otherworldly and magical: "We're all just a collection of things. Brought together by the sea. Torn apart."

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. There is a mythic quality to the novel, both in the heroism of ordinary people in the face of power, and the character of Nefyn, with her folkloric affinity to the sea. These mysteries are revealed slowly and delicately, lending them credibility. Nefyn’s powers are initially underplayed, in a way that makes them strangely believable. Other books that come to mind are How Saints Die by Carmen Marcus and the surreal stories of the Scottish writer Kirsty Logan, who uses myth to great effect in her fiction. 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. In times of war, Lewis finds resilience, redemption and hope...DRIFT feels perfectly judged' OBSERVER

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, 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. 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.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.