One quiet evening in Salisbury, the peace is shattered by a serious car crash. At that moment, five lives collide – a flower seller, a schoolboy, an army wife, a security guard, a widower – all facing their own personal disasters. This is a spectacular book; unusual, sad, poetic, and gorgeously-written. Five intersecting stories in five very different voices, all set in the shadow of Salisbury Cathedral and the context of a single incident reveal how closely we co-exist; how fragile our lives can often be and how beautiful the small human connections that we make on a daily basis can be, when revealed in just the right kind of light.
Selected by our December Guest Editor Joanne Harris
| Primary Genre | General Fiction |
A Times bestseller 'Wonderful...I was hooked from the first page. It's the real stuff.' - Michael Frayn 'Deeply affecting' - Guardian 'Superb' - Mail on Sunday 'Barney Norris is a rare and precious talent' - Evening Standard 'There exists in all of us a song waiting to be sung which is as heart-stopping and vertiginous as the peak of the cathedral. That is the meaning of this quiet city, where the spire soars into the blue, where rivers and stories weave into one another, where lives intertwine.' One quiet evening in Salisbury, the peace is shattered by a serious car crash. At that moment, five lives collide - a flower seller, a schoolboy, an army wife, a security guard, a widower - all facing their own personal disasters. As one of those lives hangs in the balance, the stories of all five unwind, drawn together by connection and coincidence into a web of love, grief, disenchantment and hope that perfectly represents the joys and tragedies of small town life. Barney Norris's third novel, The Vanishing Hours, will be published in July 2019.
Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain features in the following genres: General Fiction, Fiction
Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain is available in Paperback
Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain was written by Barney Norris and published by Black Swan an imprint of Transworld Publishers Ltd
Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain has 283 pages
£9.89