She That Lay Silent-Like Upon Our Shore: 'An act of pure imagination' ANNE ENRIGHT by Brendan Casey
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'An act of pure imagination: this is one of those stories that arrive fully formed in the writer's head, asking to be written first and understood later. The result is a kind of vision, told with great attention to language, voice and tone' ANNE ENRIGHT
'Strange and darkly wondrous . . . like a wild and witty outtake from a folkloric Moby-Dick' PHILIP HOARE
A creature from another world had collided with ours - a reckonin she might properwise be knowt, a great reckonin had washed upon our shores, and I ran twort it.
On a remote island in the northern seas an unnamed boy is exiled from his community and cast into the Wastelands. In his struggle to survive he breaks away from the strictures of his upbringing and aligns himself with the beauty and brutality of the natural world. The Leviathan, a colossal beast that strands itself upon the shore, is the embodiment of everything the boy has yearned for and he vows to protect it with his life. The community's religious leader, the Prelate, proclaims the creature to be the devil incarnate, triggering a physical and philosophical battle that will propel life on the island towards a bloody and inevitable end.
Told in a remarkable narrative voice, She That Lay Silent-like Upon Our Shore is a powerful fable about loyalty, isolation and humanity's complex relationship with nature.