Booklist Reviews

It's a dark and stormy night at the Swan Inn, located in a sleepy village on the upper banks of the River Thames, circa 1870. The usual patrons are gathered 'round for their typical night of swapping stories when a man bursts in with a lifeless four-year-old girl in his arms. He immediately collapses, setting off a mesmerizing, moody tale of identity, family, secrets, and storytelling. The stranger has identification, but the girl is a complete mystery—and everyone wants to lay claim to her. A farmer from a neighboring town believes she is the daughter of his estranged son, while a wealthy couple are convinced she is their daughter, who was kidnapped two years ago and is now miraculously returned. And some of the Swan's customers, steeped in legends and superstition, think she is the daughter of the ghostly ferryman who haunts the river. The story unfolds at an almost maddeningly slow pace until, at last, all the truths are revealed. Setterfield fills this richly layered plot with a fascinating cast of memorable characters who weave in and out of each other's lives. HIGH-DEMAND BACKLIST: Setterfield's gothic debut, The Thirteenth Tale? (2006), remains a much-loved sure bet title in library circles. Expect holds for her new novel. Copyright 2018 Booklist Reviews.

BookPage Reviews

Mysterious matters of life and death

Diane Setterfield has captivated readers around the world with her intricately woven tales, but the bestselling British novelist admits that creating them has affected her in unexpected ways.

Most recently, with the publication of her third book, Once Upon a River, she's been seeing rivers everywhere, even when looking at things like leaf patterns or cracks on a wall. "When you've been focusing on something so intently for a time," she says, laughing, "the whole world seems made of rivers. You get slightly bonkers after novel writing."

The river in question is the Thames, and Setterfield's focus became so complete that a few years ago she moved to a home near its banks in Oxford. "I can leave my front door and be down there in a couple of minutes," she says by phone from her home. "I think it's one of those mysterious ways in which a life where you spend several years intensively imagining something seems to create change in the real world for you."

Once Upon a River begins on the dark night of the winter solstice in 1887, when a photographer pulls a 4-year-old girl out of the Thames' icy waters and delivers her apparently dead body to an inn, the Swan at Radcot.

When the child miraculously revives, the mystery deepens as various families begin to argue about her identity. One couple rejoices that their daughter, kidnapped two years ago, has finally been found, while a local farmer believes the girl to be the offspring of his estranged son. And defying any sort of logic, a hardscrabble woman named Lily announces that the girl is her sister, who drowned decades ago. In the meantime, others whisper that she is the child of a phantom ferryman named Quietly. The girl herself remains mute, offering no clues to her identity. As Setterfield writes: "A body always tells a story—but this child's corpse was a blank page."

And oh, what a story it turns out to be, as Setterfield enlivens her pages with a broad cast of colorful characters, all with their own stories to tell. "What I longed for," she says, "was a room with great big walls where I could just put everything on the wall, and I could physically re-create the themes and the character lines and the chapters of the novel all around me."

The story's vast roots stretched back to Setterfield's own childhood in the 1960s, when her 2-year-old sister, Mandy, was diagnosed with a heart defect. Doctors told their parents that Mandy couldn't be operated on until she was older and bigger. From that point on, Setterfield recalls, "Family life became very, very different. I can remember having terrible nightmares as a child, and when I look back, the nightmares I had were always about my sister: losing my sister, my sister falling down into a hole in the ground and I couldn't get her out. I was much more aware than most children are of what sickness is and what dying means."

About that time, young Setterfield heard about an American boy who "drowned" in a lake but subsequently came back to life. Thrilled, she told her grandmother, "We must tell Mandy that if she died, she just might come back. And then it will be all right." That's not how it works, her grandmother informed her.

"While I was writing the book, I found myself thinking a lot about the pleasure of being a child when your mum or your dad reads a story to you."

Years later, when Setterfield was in her 20s, she read about a similar incident in Scotland, in an article that explained the science behind the mammalian dive reflex—the body's response to submersion in chilled water that accounts for such survival.

Happily, Mandy outgrew her heart problem without needing surgery and is "absolutely fine now." (Setterfield dedicates Once Upon a River to Mandy and their other sister, Paula.) Yet despite the real-life storybook ending, the remnants of Setterfield's childhood nightmares linger, which made writing the sections about Lily and her guilt about her sister's death paralyzingly difficult. "There came a time," she admits, "that I had to look myself straight in the face and say, ‘Diane, what are you avoiding?'"

One of the novel's central premises is "the different ways human beings create stories to explain something miraculous or impossible or unlikely." As a result, setting the book in the latter part of the 19th century made immediate sense, Setterfield says, because "science had just gotten started explaining human beings to themselves," and she could contrast these scientific theories with prevailing notions of superstition, folklore and gossip.

Not surprisingly, as its title suggests, Once Upon a River is a book about storytelling, in which the narrator occasionally addresses readers directly. "While I was writing the book, I found myself thinking a lot about the pleasure of being a child when your mum or your dad reads a story to you. This is a story for adults, and it's not specifically to be read aloud, but I thought if I can just have a few little moments that will be reminiscent of what it's like to be in a comfortable, safe place and someone you trust is telling you a story, then that would just be a lovely thing to do," Setterfield says.

Setterfield hasn't always been a storyteller, having first been an academic in England and France. She left teaching and burst onto the publishing world in 2006 with her hit debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale, a modern gothic novel about a dying writer. That's about the time when she began to have what she calls "a distant sense of a book" about a drowned girl who comes back to life.

Exhausted and exhilarated by the publicity tours for The Thirteenth Tale, Setterfield spent a two-week holiday along the banks of the Thames, taking what she calls "a discovery walk" of about 180 or so miles, from the river's underground source all the way to London.

Without having any plot or location specifics in mind, she says, "I just wanted to drink in the general feeling of being by the river." As she fondly describes the journey, reminiscing about how at first she found it quite easy to wander off from the initial narrow, bramble- and mud-covered path, she has a sudden realization: "Here's a metaphor very much like the early stages of writing a novel!" Continuing with that thread, she adds, "And then, the longer you follow it, the stronger the current is and the more certainty you have. Wow!"

Setterfield took notes while making her river journey, but she tucked them away in her office for a long while and wrote another novel, Bellman & Black. After that, she finally tackled the river story.

At times, she despaired of ever being able to wrestle it into shape. Now that she's done, she's monumentally relieved, and still in the "honeymoon phase" of writing her next book. "You should really talk to writers when they're right in the thick of it," she suggests with a cheerful chuckle, "and then it would probably be a very different interview."

One reward for her perseverance has already materialized: A TV series of Once Upon a River is forthcoming from the team that created "Broadchurch" and "Grantchester."

Meanwhile, Setterfield continues to contemplate the river. Although she can't see the Thames from her house, she says, "I'm pretty sure that if I could put a window in the roof space of the attic, I'd be high enough to see over the streets to the river. I think about it so many times, you'd be amazed. Every time I go up there, I stand there, almost as if I'm trying to see through the roof, but I'm just imagining that window so hard. I may just have to ring up a few architects."

 

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Susie Barker.

Copyright 2018 BookPage Reviews.

Kirkus Reviews

In Setterfield's (Bellman and Black, 2014, etc.) new novel, a town by the River Thames is deeply shaken and inspired by the arrival—and apparent resurrection—of a mysterious young girl. At the Swan, an inn along the river, storytellers gather to spin their magic on cold winter nights. But not even the most creative teller can compete with the horror of reality when a stranger, horribly beaten, arrives at the door, clutching a dead child. As Rita, the local nurse and midwife, gently takes stock of the man's injuries, she also realizes that the child is not dead, though no one seems to know who she is. Soon enough, two possibilities arise: She might be the kidnapped daughter of a local businessman, or she might be the daughter of a local farmer's scoundrel son. She may even be, the denizens of the Swan acknowledge in whispers, and stranger still, the long-lost daughter of the phantom ferryman who patrols the Thames, saving those who fall in before their time and tak ing those whose time has come to the other side of that vast, mercurial expanse. Setterfield masterfully assembles an ensemble of wounded, vulnerable characters who, nevertheless, live by the slimmest margins of hope—hope that springs from family, from the search for meaning, from people's decency to strangers, from the belief that truth heals and sets one free. Despite the harsh vagaries of the river, it also brings the promise of life and the peace of death and, Setterfield reminds us, the never-ending, transformative power of stories. And stories, in turn, expose our humanity—the best and worst of humankind, and somewhere in between, the quiet, unremarkable connections, the small gestures, the perfect heartbreaks that give our lives meaning. Celebrates the timeless secrets of life, death, and imagination—and the enduring power of words. Fans, rejoice! Definitely more The Thirteenth Tale than Bellman and Black. Copyright Kirkus 2018 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.

Library Journal Reviews

Setterfield debuted in 2006 with the New York Times best-selling The Thirteenth Tale and followed in 2013 with the darkly sparkling Bellman & Black, a No. 1 LibraryReads pick and a personal favorite. Here, villagers puzzle over the identity of a child pulled from the icy river: Is she a kidnap victim finally returned home? The daughter of a local couple's estranged son? Or associated with the mysterious Quietly, whose appearance in the village always signals change?

Copyright 2018 Library Journal.

Library Journal Reviews

One stormy night a stranger stumbles into the Swan Inn, near death from unexplained injuries, but soon becomes less astonishing than the bundle in his arms—a drowned little girl. Local nurse Rita tends to the stranger and confirms to the assembled people that the child is already gone. But when the child wakes up only a few hours later, the inn's patrons start talking about the miracle child who died and then lived. As the story spreads from house to house, claims are made for the child: the parson's housekeeper believes it's her sister; the young and wealthy couple cry that it's their kidnapped daughter; and a scoundrel says she's the daughter his wife took away from him. What is the truth? And where does the mythical ferryman Quietly fit into the story? VERDICT Setterfield's latest novel is set near the Thames river and surrounding villages. The heart of the story are the relationships that twist and turn, as if they also follow the river. Recommended to readers who enjoy popular or historical fiction with gothic twists as well as fans of the author's other novels, especially The Thirteenth Tale. [See Prepub Alert, 7/2/18.]—Jennifer Funk, McKendree Univ. Lib., Lebanon, IL

Copyright 2018 Library Journal.

Publishers Weekly Reviews

Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale) braids miracle and mystery in this marvelous tale set in the upper reaches of the Thames at the end of the 19th century. The story begins on a winter solstice night, when a gravely injured man stumbles into the Swan inn at Radcot and collapses. While the local nurse, Rita Sunday, is being summoned, the innkeeper's son discovers that the large puppet the man was carrying is a little girl who at first appears to have drowned. After tending to the unconscious man, Rita turns her attentions to the child, who, stunningly, returns to life. The tale of the dead-then-alive girl travels throughout the night, and, in the morning, three parties arrive to claim her: Lily White, housekeeper to the parson, identifies the child as her sister Ann, despite the age difference; Robert Armstrong, a prosperous farmer, believes the girl to be the child of his absent son, Robin; and Helena and Anthony Vaughan hope that she might be their daughter, Amelia, kidnapped two years before. Setterfield's characters attempt to puzzle out the child's identity. By combining flavors of some of Britain's very best writers—a hint of Austen's domestic stories, a tinge of Tolkien's more folkloric elements, and a dash of mystery from Christie—Setterfield has created a tale not to be missed. (Jan.)

Copyright 2018 Publishers Weekly.