A beautiful modern fable about the price we pay for
love - a magical and truly original novel.
'This is the story of a river and the keeping of magic and the
making of water and the nature of love. Some would say that any story
of water is always a story of magic and other would say that any story
of love was the same ... One day love laid down by the river. It slept
in a blue patterned shirt and through the afternoon, though I watched,
it did not stir but dreamed with the river and when it woke it saw me.
Love was not the pattern of leaves and the texture of bark, it was not
the underbelly of river or the way of fish, though all that was here
was part of it and has gone on beyond it. Love was the passing of the
sky across a face, it was the arc of conversation, the yearning to go
on and never look back, the desire to be something other than I was ...
I never thought to ask what belonging was, nor how I might be free of
it, until I loved Wilson James.'
The River Wife is a simple and subtle fable of love. It
tells the story of the river wife - part human, part fish - whose duty
is to tend the river, but instead falls in love with a man. Tender and
melancholy, it speaks of desire and love, mothers and daughters,
kinship and care, duty and sacrifice, water and wisdom. There is a
great sternness and sadness here, coupled with gentleness. A love
story, a fable, a retelling of the Orpheus myth, The River Wife
is grave, tender and otherworldly - a true original.
About The Author
Heather Rose is Chairman and founder of Green Team Australia,
partnered with Green Team USA in New York, specialists in advertising
and community engagement on environmental and health issues. She is
also a Telstra Tasmanian Business Woman of the Year and her business
has won nineteen international creative awards since 1999. Heather is
also the author of two novels - White Heart and The
Butterfly Man. The Butterfly Man, which tells the story
of the disappearance of Lord Lucan in 1974, was longlisted for the 2007
IMPAC Awards, shortlisted for the Nita B Kibble Award in 2006 and won
the 2006 Davitt Award for the Crime Fiction Novel of the Year.