Slow River

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By Nicola Griffith

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Publisher Description

Nicola Griffith, winner of the Tiptree Award and the Lambda Award for her widely acclaimed first novel Ammonite, now turns her attention closer to the present in Slow River, the dark and intensely involving story of a young woman's struggle for survival and independence on the gritty underside of a near-future Europe.
She awoke in an alley to the splash of rain. She was naked, a foot-long gash in her back was still bleeding, and her identity implant was gone. Lore Van de Oest was the daughter of one of the world's most powerful families...and now she was nobody.
Then out of the rain walked Spanner, an expert data pirate who took her in, cared for her wounds, and gave her the freedom to reinvent herself again and again. No one could find Lore if she didn't want to be found: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who had left her in that alley to die. She had escaped...but she paid for her newfound freedom in crime, deception, and degradation--over and over again.
Lore had a choice: She could stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner...and risk losing herself forever. Or she could leave Spanner and find herself again by becoming someone else: stealing the identity implant of a dead woman, taking over her life, and inventing her future.
But to start again, Lore required Spanner's talents--Spanner, who needed her and hated her, and who always had a price. And even as Lore agreed to play Spanner's games one final time, she found that there was still the price of being a Van de Oest to be paid. Only by confronting her past, her family, and her own demons could Lore meld together who she had once been, who she had become, and the person she intended to be....
In Slow River, Nicola Griffith skillfully takes us deep into the mind and heart of her complex protagonist, where the past must be reconciled with the present if the future is ever to offer solid ground. Slow River poses a question we all hope never to need to answer: Who are you when you have nothing left?

56 Reviews

3.5

Created 3 months ago

aya477

Created 8 months ago

Coffee Dregs

Created about 1 year ago

Sarah

Created about 1 year ago

“Read for the https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/152458-ultimate-popsugar-reading-challenge prompt Bestseller from a Genre You Don't Normally Read 6/2 - The main character in this book is a SEWERAGE TREATMENT PLANT SPECIALIST. How many other books can say that?! My dad designs and builds sewerage treatment plants (although he tells me that the industry refuses to use the word 'sewerage' in any way because it puts people off drinking the perfectly clean water that comes from a sewerage treatment plant, his title is Principal Engineer specialising in Water Treatment). After realising what Lore's working background was I told my dad and tried to explain some of the details of the story (he has also never heard of a book with a main character who works in water treatment and was very excited when I told him about this character's unique career choice), unfortunately most of the technical details went over my head and just left me with glazed over eyes. In the end I stopped trying to explain exactly what Lore's job was and just read him large passages of the text. Most of the information was technically correct, but everything was highly exaggerated. You don't need anywhere near as many people working in a water treatment plant as Griffith has working at Hedon Road (and before anyone suggests that this book was written in 1995 and my dad is talking about how a plant is run in 2017, I asked exactly that question and he said that water treatment plants have been run this way with a staff of that size since the early 1900s, things have hardly changed in the last 20 years). Dad says that some of the plants that he's visited just have a single guy doing the monitoring on a bi-weekly rotation and simply check in at the plant for a few minutes before moving on to the next one on the schedule. The idea of having so many people working at the plant and the need for shifts is ridiculous and something only someone who's never actually visited a plant would assume (either that or Griffith wrote it that way to make everything more dramatic - higher possible body count = higher excitement). The other part of the plot that was over done to an even sillier extent was the possible consequences of a spill into the city water pipes. There's no way anyone would experience any immediate symptoms from drinking/bathing in water that's contaminated with anything. It's all very scary sounding, but you just couldn't get enough of the contaminant into the system to counteract how much it's diluted before it actually comes out of your taps. The only real fear of poisoning from your drinking water comes from long term exposure, for example if there is lead leaching into a city's water over 20 years. That would lead to some of the disastrous consequences that Griffith predicts, but nothing would happen immediately. So, while I enjoyed the story of Lore and Spanner and her quest to find out what really happened to her and appreciated what might be the only water treatment plant specialist main character, I did find Griffith's exaggeration of the inner workings of water treatment plants irritating.”

marc towersap

Created about 1 year ago

About Nicola Griffith

Nicola Griffith is a native of Yorkshire, England, where she earned her beer money teaching women’s self-defense, fronting a band, and arm-wrestling in bars, before discovering writing and moving to the United States. Her immigration case was a fight and ended up making new law: the State Department declared it to be “in the National Interest” for her to live and work in this country. This didn’t thrill the more conservative powerbrokers, and she ended up on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, where her case was used as an example of the country’s declining moral standards.

In 1993 a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis slowed her down a bit, and she concentrated on writing: Ammonite (1993), Slow River (1995), The Blue Place (1998), Stay (2002), Always (2007), and Hild (2013). Griffith is the co-editor of the Bending the Landscape series of original short fiction. Her multimedia memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life, is a limited collector’s edition. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in an assortment of academic texts and a variety of journals, including Nature, New Scientist, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Out. She’s won the Washington State Book Award, the Tiptree, Nebula, the World Fantasy Award, the Premio Italia, and the Lambda Literary Award (six times), among many others.

Now a dual U.S./U.K. citizen, Nicola Griffith is married to writer Kelley Eskridge. They live in Seattle, where Griffith is currently lost in the seventh century, emerging occasionally to drink just the right amount of beer and take enormous delight in everything.