Shelley Read

'Shelley Read's lyrical voice is a force of nature and when she lends it to a woman leading a hardscrabble life in rural Colorado, the result is tragic, uplifting and completely unforgettable' BONNIE GARMUS, author of LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY' 'A compelling tale of love blighted by bigotry, and a heroine fighting back' PATRICK GALE ______________ Sometimes you must carve your own path. On a cool autumn morning, Victoria Nash heads into her village pulling a rickety wagon filled with late-season peaches. As she nears an intersection, a stranger in town stops to ask her the way. She makes the decision to walk with him. 'Go as a river,' he tells her as they part ways. So begins a mezmerising story of split-second decisions and considered acts that make up one woman's tumultuous life, as Victoria begins to absorb and follow his words. Gathering all the pieces of her small and extraordinary existence, spinning through the eddies of desire, heartbreak and betrayal, she will arrive at a single rocky decision that will change her life for ever. ______________- 'A lush, beautiful, strong book. It took me on such a transformative life journey. I could not put it down' CLOVER STROUD 'Completely spellbinding, vivid, and luminous' JANE GREEN 'Go As a River delivers so very much: the tenderness and curiosity of young love, the eternal pangs of loss, the brutality of racism, the sustaining power of nature and the miracle of a mother's love. Suffused with wisdom and compassion, this shattering testimony to life must be savored, treasured, shared' MEG WAITE CLAYTON, author of The Postmistress of Paris

A soaring, heartstopping coming-of-age novel of female resilience and becoming, for fans of WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING

Go as a River

Victoria Justice

I've come to understand how the exceptional lurks beneath the ordinary, like the deep and mysterious world beneath the surface of the sea.

The stranger's eyes were as dark and shiny as a raven's wing. And kind - that is what I remember most about those eyes from the first glimpse until the final gaze - a gentleness that seemed to fountain from his center and spill out like an overflowing well.

Love is a private matter, to be nurtured, and even mourned, between two beings alone. It belongs to them and no one else, like a secret treasure, like a private poem.

Try as we might to convince ourselves otherwise, the moment of our becoming cannot be carefully plucked like the ripest and most satisfying peach from the bough. In the endless stumble toward ourselves, we harvest the crop we are given.

Sometimes a woman splits in two. Sometimes a woman is a public self who sits rigid on a bench with proper dignity and acceptance as someone she deeply loves walks away, while simultaneously her private self is shrieking and chasing and grasping and tackling and begging that love to stay.

I had tried, as Wil taught me, to go as a river, but it had taken me a long while to understand what that meant. Flowing forward against obstacle was not my whole story. For, like the river, I had also gathered along the way all the tiny pieces connecting me to everything else.

Go as a River quotes

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