"Never thought he would miss the mud: the gleaming, slickness of it. The slap and suck at the turning of the tide; its rich, bird-shit stink after a hot day and a couple of pints at the Rose. Or the green-blue-yellow hues that marked the changes in the light, as the days and seasons marched over the village and the river. And now, just snow. Endless snow. A young man is found brutally murdered in the middle of a snowed-in village. Besides his body stands another young man, axe in hand. Though the villagers had inklings of what might occur none stopped it from happening. Wivenhoe is a haunting novel set in an alternate present, in an estuary village in Essex blanketed in snow, the day after this murder. Taking place over 24 hours, and told in beautifully observed prose from the alternating perspectives of a terminally ill mother and her adult son, the novel imagines a world, not unlike our own, starting to slowly grapple with a natural disaster and the shifts in social mores and moral convictions that it precipitates. Wivenhoe is a story about complicity and illness, male violence and counter-violence, about landscape and environment. It exposes what happens when our connection to our surroundings is severed and we can no longer recognise our own homes. Playing with the decisions we make when faced with questions of survival, Fisher deftly explores the power of instinct in a novel that warns us of environmental disaster and the psychological impact of such an event."--Provided by publisher.