‘Wivenhoe’ – A New Novel by Samuel Fisher
‘Wivenhoe’ by Samuel Fisher
OUT NOW!
Wivenhoe-born author and bookeller Sam Fisher’s extraordinary second novel, ‘Wivenhoe’ is a tender evocation of a place so familiar to us, with wide skies, the rolling river, and gleaming mud. Yet the time is unfamiliar – an alternate present in a world that is slowly waking up to the fact that it is living through an environmental disaster.
About the Book
Never thought he would miss the mud: the gleaming, slickness of it. The slap and suck at the turning of the tide; its rich, bird-shit stink after a hot day and a couple of pints at the Rose. Or the green-blue-yellow hues that marked the changes in the light, as the days and seasons marched over the village and the river. And now, just snow. Endless snow.
A young man is found brutally murdered in the middle of the snowed-in village of Wivenhoe. Over his body stands another man, axe in hand. The gathered villagers must deal with the consequences of an act that no-one tried to stop.
WIVENHOE is a haunting novel set in an alternate present, in a world that is slowly waking up to the fact that it is living through an environmental disaster. Taking place over twenty-four hours and told through the voices of a mother and her adult son, we see how one small community reacts to social breakdown and isolation.
Samuel Fisher imagines a world, not unlike our own, struck down and on the edge of survival. Tense, poignant, and set against a dramatic landscape, WIVENHOE asks the question: if society as we know it is lost, what would we strive to save? At what point will we admit complicity in our own destruction?
About the Author
Wivenhoe-born Samuel Fisher’s debut novel, THE CHAMELEON, was recipient of a Betty Trask Award. His second novel, WIVENHOE, is published on 3rd Feb 2022.
Sam is co-owner of Burley Fisher Books and a director of Peninsula Press, a publisher of boundary pushing fiction and non-fiction, founded in 2017 by three booksellers and based in London.
Book Reviews
‘There is so much to treasure in Wivenhoe – at once a loving evocation of place and the memorable characters who people it, and an unflinching examination of self-defeating survival strategies which threaten their very existence. In stunning, insightful, deeply humane prose, as daily rhythms dissolve into violence and resentment, Fisher indicts all of us yet still offers hope that we may change the ending of this story.’
Olivia Sudjic