Book review: The Fish Ladder - grieving mother journeys to rivers' sources

The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream
by Katharine Norbury
Bloomsbury

That rare book that works its way into your very marrow in unforeseen and magical ways, The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream has been described variously as an example of "new nature writing", a memoir cum travelogue, and "a portrait of a motherhood and a hymn to the adoptive family". But Katharine Norbury's debut non-fiction work manages to avoid all the usual moorings of genre and form on its uniquely original journey upstream.

What begins as a coping mechanism, a device to get herself and her young daughter, Evie, "through an otherwise blighted summer", as Norbury describes her planned series of walks tracing watercourses from the sea to their source, morphs into something entirely original and intoxicating.

It opens with nine-year-old Evie writing in her journal that she and her mother plan to follow a number of watercourses from sea to source, carefully underlining the words, as their summer project. Norbury then tells of her miscarriage and of her hopes that this project might stave off the lingering grief, or more particularly the stasis - she declares the word "depression" too vague.

As an adopted child herself, the lost baby had triggered in her a desire to know where she herself had come from. And so her summer walks, her journeys to the source of rivers, become a journey into the source of her own life, into the nature of belonging, and the role of both genealogy and place in shaping human identity.