I’m thrilled to announce that my debut novel will be published by Unsung Stories in 2019! It’s about climate change, motherhood and sacrifice with two twinned narratives; one set in mesolithic Doggerland and the other set in a future UK where infrastructure is crumbling.
The novel started to form in my mind in 2016 when I moved to Putney, on the banks of the river Thames. Most days I would cycle along the path on the southern bank to and from work and I became friends with the river. I got to know its tides, learnt the places where it would spill over the banks at the high flood tides and watched as the silt the floods left behind got washed back into the river by the rain. I started to recognise the trees lining the path in all their seasons. I gathered nettles and ramsons from the path and put them in a pasta sauce.
I thought about all the people who had moved up and down that stretch of water throughout the centuries; on foot, on wheels, on boats. A nineteenth century MP, John Burns, called the Thames ‘liquid history’ and I started to feel myself a part of that. I began to imagine what the banks would have looked like before the Victorian sewers were built, before horse chestnut trees came to Britain, when there was nowhere to cross the water other than London Bridge in the east.
At the same time, I was reading a lot about historical events that might have been the basis for the myths and legends we still know today. Archaeologists have found remnants of mesolithic and neolithic cultures under the Black Sea and the theory is that as the last ice age ended and the glaciers withdrew from the land, the sea levels rose to such an extent that there were huge floods across many civilisations, some of which were destroyed permanently when the sea levels stayed at their new height.
What if this event was encoded into our collective memory through the various stories of apocalyptic floods that exist in world mythology? There was the great flood of Gun-Yu in China, the flood Noah built his ark for, Manu’s flood in the Hindu Satapatha Brahmana, and high water drowning everyone several times over in Aztec and Mayan mythology. Every time I cycled along the river path at high tide I thought of those legendary floods, and then I thought of the latest climate change news stories. Which cities were projected to be under water by which decade of the twenty first century, what were the best case scenarios for 2 degrees of warming, what about for 3.
If we were really listening when we were told these old stories, we would know that we wouldn’t want to find out.
I found myself inside what the wonderful Alan Garner calls a ‘what-if corral’. What was south east England like before one of those huge floods, maybe one caused by a natural disaster like Storegga Slides in about 6200 BCE? What does it feel like to have your home slowly eaten away by the sea? How did people live so long ago? What did they value, what did they do all day? Did they accept the changes in their world more than we do, or did they fight against it?
I started writing to find out.
Unsung Stories are a fantastic, cutting edge indie publisher putting out some of the best speculative fiction out there and I think the book has found its perfect home. See more about them and their BFSS best independent press prize here: