Two children are divided by centuries, countries, language and religion, though each of those things also unite them, aided by the principle of “aquatic memory” that dominates a novel that is always absorbing and often painfully affecting. The first is Arthur Smyth, born on the foreshore of the River Thames in 1840 to an impoverished and terrified young woman, and given his name by the “toshers” – shoreline scavengers and foragers – who gather around her and pronounce him King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums. Arthur is both blessed and cursed by a phenomenal memory, and although grinding poverty and a vicious, violent father blight his early life, his intellectual gifts allow him first to find work at a printing and publishing company and then at the British Museum.
In 2014, at the edge of the Tigris, Narin lives in a small village in which her Yazidi community forms an even smaller, and increasingly marginalised, part. Cared for by her grandmother, a water-dowser and storyteller, she is losing her hearing and anticipates that soon, her world will fall silent. Before then, however, she is to travel to Iraq to be baptised in the holy valley of Lalish, the more usual home ceremony having been made impossible by the encroachment of the bulldozers working on a vast dam.
