Rivering

On the quiet banks of the Thames in the 1960s, Poppy Jackson spends her childhood "rivering" - swimming, boating and wandering the hidden waterways that shape the rhythms of village life. The river is freedom, danger and sanctuary all at once.

 

When she meets Molly, a newcomer from London, the girls form an intense friendship that draws them into a world of boathouses, locks, weirs and long summer afternoons drifting between childhood and adulthood. But beneath the beauty of the river valley lie darker currents: buried grief, institutional cruelty, class divisions, hidden desires and the lingering trauma of war.

 

As the girls grow older, the people around them carry secrets of their own - mothers unravelling under quiet pressures, men damaged by histories nobody speaks about, and a community shaped as much by what it refuses to remember as by what it preserves.

 

Lyrical, haunting and deeply rooted in the landscape of the English river valley, Rivering is a novel about memory, belonging, friendship and the stories that survive beneath the surface of ordinary lives.