In Weathering Lucy Wood takes us to a rural landscape, where we are pulled into a dilapidated house and dragged along by the river which flows through the book.

During the wet autumn Ada, together with her six-year-old daughter Pepper, moves into the house where she grew up and where her mother, Pearl, lived alone till her death. Ada intends to have the old house done up so that she can sell it, and leave the area for good. Meanwhile Pearl, whose ashes have been scattered in the flowing water, has become one with the river and from a certain distance she looks at the house and its new occupants and watches her daughter struggling to survive. She can only go where the water goes, has to stay close to the river and she is not able to reach the house but during rain or snowfall. Pepper enjoys being outside in nature, tries to immortalize it with the camera she found, and makes frantic approaches to the cat.

This is a book for everyone who likes to be carried along by a unique voice. Wood provides extraordinarily detailed descriptions of the environment that include sounds, smells and pictures. As a reader you look around alternately from Ada’s, Pearl’s or Pepper’s perspective, witnessing Wood’s deep empathy with her characters. This results in humorous or sometimes heartbreaking passages. The story is about relationships between mothers and daughters, love and friendships developing with difficulty. It shows us how people may lose hold on the course of events; that people try to keep up appearances, do not want to be losers, and ignore their own mistakes. It also shows how we try to free ourselves from things that do not let us go.