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About the Author

Caryl Lewis is a multi-award-winning Welsh novelist, children’s writer, playwright and screenwriter. Her breakthrough novel Martha, Jac a Sianco (2004) is widely regarded as a modern classic of Welsh literature, and sits on the Welsh curriculum. The film adaptation – with a screenplay by Lewis herself – went on to win six Welsh BAFTAs and the Spirit of the Festival award at the 2010 Celtic Media Festival. Lewis’s other screenwriting work includes BBC/S4C thrillers Hinterland and Hidden. Lewis is a visiting lecturer in Creative Writing at Cardiff University, and lives with her family on a farm near Aberystwyth. Drift is her debut novel in the English language.

Dedication

For my mother. Who was right.

Epigraph

Gobaith
’Rwy’n ofni’r distawrwydd sy’n dyfod,
Distawrwydd didostur y sêr;
Fy mhobl na fynnwch ymwared,
’Rwy’n meithrin eich marw’n fy mêr.

Ac eto ni allaf beidio
 chredu’n fy nghalon ddofn
Fod yr hen fynyddoedd yn amau
Ac yn loetran o gwmpas rhag ofn.

Hope
I fear the silence that’s coming,
The merciless silence of stars;
My people who refuse deliverance,
I nurse your death in my bones.

And yet, I cannot but believe,
In the deepest places of my heart,
That the old mountains are undecided,
And linger on to play their part.

Gerallt Lloyd Owen

1

Strandline ♦ Traethlin ♦ Alkhatu alsaahiliu

THE COVE HAD ALWAYS called things to it. Her father would blame the jutting headland, saying that it slowed the tide so that it brought forth its offerings. Her mother used to say that it was something much more than that. That the sea would show you what you needed it to, in its own time, and that the only thing you could do was wait. There would be driftwood, of course, bleached white; tangles of fishing nets and constellations of starfish so dense they’d thicken the waters with their numbers. There had been bodies, too, seal-grey and ashen, gently nudged to the sands, the victims of storms and shipping lanes or broken souls who had trusted themselves to the deep. Their pockets would be checked for change, before they were dragged to the dune-swamped church. There they’d be placed in paupers’ graves, each wooden cross marked with which tide had brought them in, as if the sea’s giving and its taking away made any difference.