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This month’s Book Club Choice is The Estuary by Tessa West. I had no choice with this one, sometimes books just jump up and down and say ‘me please’. After my appeal for book titles last month The Estuary was suggested independently by two separate people just before I visited the Arts Festival at Welbourne where Tessa happened to be giving a reading workshop. Then I accidentally came across a copy at home which had been hiding somewhere since being read two years ago.
Tessa has a website at www.tessawest.co.uk and I’m sure she won’t mind if I lift her summary of The Estuary from there.
“RAF officers Susan and Mark and a young ferryman, Robert, steer their different ways through work, friendships, families and aloneness. Susan is trying to focus on her career, while Mark's priority is Susan. The death of Susan's father throws the couple's romantic and family relationships into different perspectives as Robert ploughs on across the river, questioning his feelings about his absent family and his ability to be independent. On January 31st 1953 the disastrous East Coast floods change the shape of the estuary overnight. The ensuing devastation brings new challenges, new opportunities, new decisions.”
It sounds like an attempt at the usual ‘romantic fiction’ by another East Anglian writer but that is far from the truth. Sara Maitland hit the nail on the head when she wrote that The Estuary is a ‘rewarding novel about place…with a real emotional sensitivity in the plot.’ I think ‘emotional sensitivity’ is the key to Tessa’s writing and is paramount in her other novel The Reed Flute which depicts the final journey of an Iraqi grandfather and his grand daughter along the banks of the Yare.
Jeff Taylor
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