Pearl doesn't know how she's ended up in the river - the same messy, cacophonous river in the same rain-soaked valley she'd been stuck in for years. Or why, for that matter, she'd been stupid enough to fall down those rickety stairs.
Ada, Pearl's daughter, doesn't know how she's ended up back in the house she left thirteen years ago - with no heating apart from a fire she can't light, no way of getting around apart from an old car she's scared to drive, and no company apart from echoing footsteps on the damp floorboards. With her daughter Pepper, she starts to sort through Pearl's things, clearing the house so she can leave and not look back.
Pepper has grown used to following her restless mother from place to place, but this house, with its faded photographs, its boxes of cameras and its stuffed jackdaw, is something new. Fascinated by the scattering of people she meets, by the river that unfurls through the valley, and by the strange old woman who sits on the bank with her feet in the cold, coppery water, Pepper doesn't know why anyone would ever want to leave.
As the first frosts of autumn herald the coming of a long winter and Pepper and Ada find themselves irresistibly entangled with the life of the valley, each will discover the ways that places can take root inside us and bind us together.
[ARSE OVER ELBOW AND a mouthful of river](Bloomsbury Publishing, 15 January 2015, borrowed from my library)
This is my first time reading the author.
I thought this was a brilliant book. I loved the complex relationship between Pearl and her daughter Ada which is mirrored in the relationship between Ada and her daughter Pepper. This is explored really well.
The novel moves back and forth from the present with Pepper and Ada living in the house after Pearl has died and the past when Pepper lived in the house with her mother. It took a few chapters to get used this as there is no indication of date so it wasn't always clear I was reading about the past. Once I got used to this I liked how the story unfolded.
The characters in this book are haunted. Pearl is haunted by her husband leaving her and the seemingly endless struggle to make a life for her and her daughter in such a remote place. Ada is haunted by her stained relationship with her mother and the fact she ran away. She doesn't even realise that some of her own behaviour echoes her mothers. Pepper is haunted by her mother's restlessness and inability to stay in one place for very long.
Weathering is sad, beautiful, haunting and touching.
