Drift: Winner of the Wales Book of the Year

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A past struggle with infertility has left Efa yearning to provide maternal support to the pair who were orphaned by a absconded mother and drowned father. A violent storm will bring these two lost souls together—but other forces will soon try to tear them apart. Meanwhile, The Poetry Award went to Paul Henry for As If to Sing (Seren Poetry Wales Press Ltd) and The Creative Non-Fiction Award was won by Isabel Adonis for And… a memoir of my mother (Black Bee Books).

The natural world is beautifully observed, from the ever-changing sea to by-the-wind sailors drifting in on the tide and, on Joseph’s walks in the north, how each spot along the coast is “subtly distinct, in moth and bird and dialect. There’s a really damaging view of Welsh language-speaking Wales as insular and inward-looking, and of course that’s not true. Drift is an original and timely story about the impact of war set against an unusual backdrop of an isolated coastal town in Wales. Hamza has been illegally held prisoner by the British military, caught between their covert meddling and repressive Syrian regime.Perhaps that’s why it fell away for me in the last section, when the story goes from beautifully judged characters and mystery to a plotline which for me was unnecessarily fantastical. 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. Drift" is about a peculiar, young, 'different' Welsh woman who finds an escaped military prisoner taken from Syria by the sea. It seems quite a rustic way of going about it, when they’ve got all this sophistication and technology, but it’s actually knowing a place that they’re missing completely, and that’s what war does. Hamza also maintains, “A map is just a way of thinking about the world, but it can sometimes tell you more about the one making it than anything else,” and points out that military drones such as those tested at the base can give a surface snapshot, “but to map a place properly, you must feel it.

In times of war, Lewis finds resilience, redemption and hope; right now, Drift feels perfectly judged. It is unclear to what extent Nefyn may be mentally disabled or whether it is the effect of the pills Joseph gives her which make the locals think she is not ‘all there’. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The film adaptation – with a screenplay by Caryl – went on to win six Welsh BAFTAS and the Spirit of the Festival Award at the 2010 Celtic Media Festival.A freak landslide, when Hamza is being moved from the camp by lorry, washes him into the sea, from which he is rescued by Nefyn. Though their lives are set apart from the rest of the community, the twins are silently overseen by Efa, an older woman whose dementia-stricken husband, Emrys, is slowly fading from view. Arguably, aside from Nefyn, it is the sea that is positioned as the main character in the novel, both in Lewis’s lingering descriptions of it and the role it plays in the story itself.

Mark: There’s such a strong sense of place in Drift, with the stone cottage overlooking the cove, the empty holiday homes along the coast, and just being out in nature. It is a startling, apposite metaphor, a good example of Lewis’s attentive prose style, that also works to summarise the novel’s dramatic tension, the opposition of nature and manmade violence, the great clash that will play out over the course of the narrative.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. Nefyn has always been an enigma, even to her brother Joseph with whom she lives in a small cottage above a blustery cove. He drove me home one evening and we got talking about literature, and he went and bought one of my books, which of course was in Welsh, and then he learnt Welsh. Drift, her first novel in English, is the story of how two people, two languages and two cultures can be a source of love, not friction. But when you get to the nitty-gritty, when you get to the one-to-one, it’s often about kindness, and it’s often about our common humanity, when you’re looking in the whites of somebody’s eyes.