Undercurrent: The heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful novel about finding yourself, from the Times bestselling author of Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

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Written in the key of Anna Hope's Expectation, this is an affecting novel about the difficult route to happiness, by the award-winning author of Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain. 'The beginning of summer. Perhaps it crosses my mind even now while I wait for news of Amy that something is coming towards us. Like sighting the first slow swell of a wave.' Years ago, in an almost accidental moment of heroism, Ed saved Amy from drowning. Now, in his thirties, he finds himself adrift. He's been living in London for years - some of them good - but he's stuck in a relationship he can't move forward, has a job that just pays the bills, and can't shake the sense that life should mean more than this. Perhaps all Ed needs is a moment to pause. To exhale and start anew. And when he meets Amy again by chance, it seems that happiness might not be so far out of reach. But then tragedy overtakes him, and Ed must decide whether to let history and duty define his life, or whether he should push against the tide and write his own story. Filled with hope and characteristic warmth, Undercurrent is a moving and intimate portrait of love, of life and why we choose to share ours with the people we do.

Reviews

Norris hits this universal note squarely and successfully. Undercurrent is a defiantly unfashionable, heartfelt, emotionally vulnerable novel about mothers and sons, letting go of the past and saying what you need to say to your loved ones before it's too late. * Guardian *
A profound meditation on dealing with loss and finding your moorings in destabilising times * Observer *
Always skilled at creating character and voice... Norris demonstrates how seemingly insignificant moments impact a life. * Financial Times *
Beautiful and useful. His writing untangles the knots that tie us down, to families, to history. He writes to free us and deserves our thanks. * Spectator *
Lyrical, yearning, elegiac * Daily Mail *
Norris is a terrific writer. His characters not only convince, they're invested with a depth of personality that fixes them in the reader's mind long after the book has been replaced on the shelf... Undoubtedly one of the finest novels to come out of these islands this or any year. * New European *
Norris's latest novel is a lyrical and affecting examination of love, life and the stories that shape us * Big Issue *
A deft novel about a struggling thirtysomething man's chance meeting with a girl he once saved from drowning and the changes the event sets in motion. * Independent *
A beautiful novel, introspective and thoughtful. Undercurrent washes with a quiet intensity. * Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground *
Undercurrent is a profound and absorbing story of flux, failures and joys that charts the beautiful, ineffable welter of life itself. * Alison MacLeod, author of Tenderness *
What a beautiful, heartbreaking, wise, triumphant novel. Barney is an extraordinary writer, with a magical ability to reach into the depths of his characters' histories and chart the maps of their lives with grace and love and unstinting empathy. I always feel better about the world and the people in it after reading Barney's work. * Donal Ryan *
Norris is a novelist of such insight and sensitivity that I found myself highlighting entire pages at a time to come back to. Compassionate and unnervingly funny in its depiction of love, grief, family and our points of origin, Undercurrent is a captivating sojourn in another consciousness. I feel like I know these people in real life. Understated but magical; quietly, utterly moving. * Luke Kennard, author of The Transition *
Barney Norris has done it again and managed to destroy me with another book. Undercurrent is a powerful and really moving meditation on family and grief, written with all the thoughtfulness and grace I've come to expect from Barney's work. * Jan Carson, author of The Raptures *
A novel that, at every moment, chooses to be vulnerable, daring to show as much feeling as it possibly can - all those loves and losses that make up a life. * Lamorna Ash, author of Dark, Salt, Clear *
The best description I have read of ghosts. The process of becoming a spectre. Fragments and glimpses. Scattered memory. I loved it. * Danny Sapani *
A gorgeous, noirish page-turner which also manages to be deeply intelligent. Norris has a remarkable ability to write about love and freedom - his writing shines a light on the way stories shape our lives. * Sophie Ratcliffe, author of The Lost Properties of Love *
A visceral, beautifully-told, intergenerational story that reaches impossibly beyond the end of life to the first moments of love, through what we inherit from the past, what we may be able to create, and what we leave behind. * Professor Dan Hicks, author of The Brutish Museums *
A novel about growing up after you have already grown up. Barney Norris writes with enormous compassion for his characters and the world around them * Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither *
I read Undercurrent with pleasure and admiration. Gripping and thoroughly absorbing * Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature *
A perceptive novel about family and how the stories of the past we tell aren't always clear-cut * Good Housekeeping *
This tender, thoughtful novel captures the dilemmas of being human - the mundane and momentous things left unsaid, and expectations we can't fulfil. * Woman & Home *

Author Bio

Barney Norris has been the recipient of the International Theatre Institute's Award for Excellence, the Critics' Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright, a South Bank Sky Arts Times Breakthrough Award, an Evening Standard Progress 1000 Award, a Betty Trask Award and the Northern Ireland One Book Award. His work has been translated into eight languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, teaches Creative Writing at the University of Oxford where he is the Martin Esslin Playwright in Residence at Keble College, Oxford, and regularly reviews fiction for the Guardian.