Feeling festive this fall? Check out our new title picks for the season.

Summary and Reviews of Weathering by Lucy Wood

Weathering by Lucy Wood

Weathering

by Lucy Wood
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus:
  • First Published:
  • Jan 19, 2016, 304 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Mar 2017, 304 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About This Book

Book Summary

A dreamlike tale tale that explores big topics - belonging, mortality, love - though the lives of three women (one who is dead), and old house, and a river....

Pearl doesn't know how she's ended up in the river - the same messy, cacophonous river in the same rain-soaked valley she'd been stuck in for years. But here her spirit swirls and stays ... Ada, Pearl's daughter, doesn't know how she's ended up back in the house she left thirteen years ago - with no heating apart from a fire she can't light, no way of getting around apart from an old car she's scared to drive, and no company apart from her own young daughter, Pepper. She wants to clear out Pearl's house so she can leave and not look back. Pepper has grown used to following her restless mother from place to place, but this house, with its faded photographs, its boxes of cameras and its stuffed jackdaw, is something new. Fascinated by the scattering of people she meets, by the river that unfurls through the valley, and by the strange old woman who sits on the bank with her feet in the cold, coppery water, Pepper doesn't know why anyone would ever want to leave.

As the first frosts of autumn herald the coming of a long winter and Pepper and Ada find themselves entangled with the life of the valley, with new companions who won't be closed out, each will discover the ways that places can take root inside us, bind us together, and become us.

Excerpt
Weathering

A night of heavy rain which left the trees dripping. Water pooled on the front step and some of it came in under the door. Her mother was going to the shop but Pepper didn't want to go – it was always cold and the man that worked there, Mick, watched her and tapped his long fingers on the counter. Also, she felt a faint pang of fear whenever she thought of being in the car.

She was meant to stay indoors but everything looked varnished and bright after the rain, so she put her coat on and went outside, then came back in and slung the camera over her shoulder.

Through the sopping grass and down towards the river. It was wide and brown today, and it rippled and churned. There were deep creases when it went round rocks and a hollow, clunking noise. It looked strong, like a muscle. When she threw in a stick, the stick didn't float on the surface – it got dragged under, as if something had reached up to grab it. She walked along the bank and there was...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

For all its atmosphere, Weathering does begin to meander aimlessly, suggesting it might be better at nearer 200 pages than 300. However, Wood's enchanting prose is full of inventive metaphors: "the trees wearing mist as scarves. The light curdled like old milk" and "threadbare hair and deep rings slung hammocks under his eyes." In the end the most memorable "characters" of all are the house and the river, which take on life and power of their own. With its vivid picture of the English countryside and its clear-eyed look at family dynamics, Weathering reminds me most of recent works by Tessa Hadley, Ross Raisin, and Polly Samson (three authors perhaps less well known in the United States than in their native England). Lucy Wood is an up-and-coming talent whose gently eerie first novel speaks of great things to come...continued

Full Review (776 words)

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today.

(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).

Media Reviews

Mail on Sunday (UK)
No bald description of Wood's extraordinary novel can do justice to its lyrical prose and bold storytelling. An imaginative tour de force.

The Daily Telegraph (UK)
Five stars … Wood has created a work as intricately detailed as one of the delicate pieces of jewellery that Pearl used to restore … Wood is a creator of worlds. This sodden river valley is one to savour.

The Sunday Times (UK)
Wood beautifully renders a landscape by turns rain-soaked and snow-laden ... The author has a gift for capturing how humans are bound to and moulded by places.

The Times (UK)
Beautiful … The river and the house are wonderfully drawn and the voices of the characters, unforgettable.

The Guardian (UK)
[Wood] skilfully modifies her prose as she moves from one mind to another, leavening her vividly descriptive passages with snippets of speech or thought, wittily profane and colloquial ... Pepper is a glorious child in the tradition of Harper Lee's Scout and Donna Tartt's Harriet.

Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. A luminous modern fairy tale.

Reader Reviews

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book



A Selection of Literary Prizes

Lucy Wood, the author of Weathering, won a Somerset Maugham Award, named after the famous author.

What does it take to get a literary prize named after you? Some amount of money and/or influence in the literary world, to be sure, but also a personal connection to the prize being offered and its specific criteria. Here are a few examples of prizes you might not be aware of or might not realize were named after real people.

Somerset Maugham Awards

Recognizing published works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, the Somerset Maugham Awards are available to British writers under the age of 35. Administered by the Society of Authors, the fund was started by novelist W. Somerset Maugham in 1947 to allow young writers "to enrich their ...

This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked Weathering, try these:

  • The Other Side of the World jacket

    The Other Side of the World

    by Stephanie Bishop

    Published 2017

    About this book

    In the tradition of The Hours and Revolutionary Road comes a novel set in the 1960s about marriage, motherhood, identity, nostalgia, and the fantasy of home.

  • Spill Simmer Falter Wither jacket

    Spill Simmer Falter Wither

    by Sara Baume

    Published 2017

    About this book

    More by this author

    A debut novel already praised as "unbearably poignant and beautifully told" (Eimear McBride) this captivating story follows - over the course of four seasons - a misfit man who adopts a misfit dog.

We have 8 read-alikes for Weathering, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Season of the Swamp
    Season of the Swamp
    by Yuri Herrera
    Though he will go on to become President, reformer, and national hero of Mexico, in 1853 Benito Ju&#...
  • Book Jacket: Playground
    Playground
    by Richard Powers
    The primary narrator of Richard Powers' latest novel, Playground, is Todd Keane, who at 57 years old...
  • Book Jacket: The Empusium
    The Empusium
    by Olga Tokarczuk
    Not long after checking into Willi Opitz's "Guesthouse for Gentlemen," young Mieczysław Wojnicz...
  • Book Jacket
    Suggested in the Stars
    by Yoko Tawada
    In Scattered All Over the Earth, Yoko Tawada's 2018 lightly dystopian novel, a ragtag group of young...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    The Naming Song
    by Jedediah Berry

    Miyazaki meets Guillermo del Toro.

  • Book Jacket

    The Bog Wife
    by Kay Chronister

    Five West Virginia siblings unearth secrets after the rupture of a supernatural bargain tying their fate to their land.

Book Club Giveaway!
Win Let Us Descend

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward imagines the life of an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War in this instant classic.

Enter

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

J O the B

and be entered to win..