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430 pages, Hardcover
First published May 2, 2017
"النهر يمكنه أن يرجع للماضي ويجلبه كله ويبصقه علي حوافه ليراه الجميع..ولكن البشر لا يمكنهم"It's simple, they found her in the water... she jumped...
"The River can go back over the past and bring it all up and and spit it out on the banks in full view of everyone, but people can't."
"We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection. Hallucinations ~ Oliver Sacks"Breckford, a small town in the British Isles must come to terms with the death of a single mother. A multi-character tale is told in which the truth and the memories populating it, become a conundrum of regrets, secrets, lost opportunities and redemption. Everyone feels guilty, nobody is willing to take the blame.
Erin: "It's a fucking weird place, Beckford. It's beautiful, quite breathtaking in parts, but it's strange. It feels like a place apart, disconnected from everything that surrounds it. Of course, it is miles from anywhere - you have to drive hours to get anywhere civilized. That's if you consider Newcastle civilized, which I'm not sure I do.Those who stayed behind after the latest death of Nel Abbott had to deal with the mysterious attraction to the Drowning Pool in the river for women committing suicide. It was the legends surrounding these mysterious deaths that attracted Danielle(Nel) Abbott to the pool for the book she was writing about these women and their demises.
Beckford is a strange place, full of odd people, with a downright bizarre history. And all through the middle of it there's this river, and that's the weirdest thing of all - it seems like whichever way you turn, in whatever direction you go, somehow you always end up back at the river.
The Drowning Pool', Danielle Abbott (unpublished):As atmospheric as you can wish for; picturesque as you can get, and intriguing as you cannot imagine.
I decided, while in the process of trying to understand myself and my family and the stories we tell each other, that I would try to make sense of all the Beckford stories, that I would write down all the last moments, as I imagined them, in the lives of the women who went to the Beckford Drowning Pool.
Its name carries weight; and yet, what is it? A bend in the river, that’s all. A meander. You’ll find it if you follow the river in all its twists and turns, swelling and flooding, giving life and taking it, too. The river is by turns cold and clean, stagnant and polluted; it snakes through forest and cuts like steel through the soft Cheviot Hills, and then, just north of Beckford, it slows. It rests, just for a while, at the Drowning Pool."