The Last To Drown by Lorraine Wilson

I would like to thank Luna Press Publishing for an advance copy of this novella in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Luna Press Publishing

Published – 19/2

Price – £8.99 paperback £3.99 Kindle eBook

People from this house go down to the sea at night, and drown.

Tinna cannot remember the last words she said to her husband. Three whole months of her memories were stolen in the crash that killed him and left her scarred and suffering from chronic pain.

Adrift and struggling to reconcile herself to this dual loss, Tinna accepts her aunt's invitation to return to her childhood home on a remote Icelandic coast. Perhaps the solitude and the sea will help her recover her memories.

But a greater grief has already taken hold here, one that has haunted the women of Tinna's family for generations. When her secretive aunt forbids Tinna from going down to the shore in the dark, she still cannot resist. Then she hears whispers on the tide offering her the answers she so desperately needs. If she can bear the price.

In stories we tend to think of the hero who is braver, stronger, and smarter than the rest. The person for whom the stakes of saving their world are all important. We may all secretly wish we could do this a few times in our lives. But we may also all remember those times when we have nearly lost everything – we are down to running on fumes and our health, our work and relationships are pretty much not enough to keep us going. We tend to avoid stories that have such characters perhaps as they strike so close to home – but perhaps we need to remember what those days are like and remind ourselves if it possible to move on. In Lorraine Wilson’s magnificent and heart-wending fantasy novella The Last To Drown we have a tale in modern Iceland of grief, pain, lost memories and most of all stakes that while won’t save the world are the most personal and captivate the reader from the start.

Tinna three months ago was in a car crash with her husband in Scotland. He died and she was treated for substantial injuries and is left in constant pain, loss of feeling in her limbs, facial scars and no memory of those final hours before her life changed. She has struggled to recover and an offer to visit her estranged Aunt Lillith in Iceland comes at the right moment. She is driven to Lillith’s home on the sea and tries to focus on just existing. But Tinna starts to feel a presence on the shore. One that seems to understand her pain and shares the sense of loss – one that offers potentially those precious lost moments back. But what price is expected?

This is a stunning piece of fantasy which excels at making us feel Tinna’s physical and emotional turmoil which is perfectly matching the ‘ice and fury’ of Iceland a painfully cold, stark landscape that also has spectacular wildlife and volcanic power hiding behind the surface. This matches Tinna who on the surface is seen as distant, lost and moving on autopilot but Wilson makes us also see the internal rage, anger, bewilderment, and grief that Tinna is feeling but not able to express to people that constantly look at her just with sympathy, well meaning words and actions and yet rarely get into sharing any empathy. Wilson also makes us feel the hour-by-hour pain Tinna is in from her injuries. Bones and muscles that ache, brain-fog, tiredness and numbness in one hand. This is not a tale of magical recovery. These are long-lasting conditions and while there are moments when Tinna feels a little better this is very much what she is now dealing with day to day, and this allows us to see the Tinna everyone else is opting not to. The loss of her love, her body and the life she knew means we have a central character that we don’t tend to see enough of in fiction and yet she is not a victim but someone trying to work out how to/if they can move on from this. Powerful stakes for us to be invested in.

This leads into what becomes the ongoing mystery. Why is her aunt so worried about Tinna going to the beach yet never explains? Stories where someone fails to give a key piece of information are often annoying but here its less a bug and more of a feature. Because everyone sees Tinna as helpless, they don’t talk to her as an adult; they don’t want to add to her burdens and we also see these secrets have been hidden by her family for a long time. We find out why she has such a complex and apparently distant relationship with her mother and those moments are genuinely shocking and yet the root cause is these hidden family stories. Here secrets are a form of toxicity in the family that is poisoning all the relationships and based on what we find out about the family has done for generations.

All of which could easily apply to any family drama but here Wilson adds a growing supernatural sense to the tale. This is a world where magical events such as elves are not simply children’s folk tales as we know people still believe certain places have elves to be wary of. Here ghosts and curses therefore seem plausible and its such a strange land - feels very raw, on the edge of the world and that this is also a setting where sea, air and land too meet makes you feel other types of boundaries of magic and real life; or the living and the dead feel plausible. Is this stress; part of her injuries or magic? Gradually we find this is a longer story and then this raises in the reader concern what will this mean for Tinna.

Tales of family curses can go in many ways and skillfully Wilson keeps on making us guess as to which way this story will go. Will Tinna just be swept along and doomed? Can Tinna’s experiences help her challenge the forces ranging against us – will empathy win? Or will Tinna find the prize offered makes her do things we didn’t think she was capable of. The reader finds how we assess her physical and mental conditions may shade how we rate Tinna as a character. The finale is tense and has a degree of ambiguity that could be read in several ways that will make the reader consider what happens after that final page for quite some time.

I’ve been a fan of Lorraine Wilson’s work for several years and this again delivered a complex poetical, emotional, and intelligent tale that sweeps the reader along into another world and character trying to make sense of it. The writing is lyrical and powerful and should be savoured ; a story that makes me feel this rawness and imagine being on this landscape is an immense achievement and I hope we have many more Wilson tales to look forward to. I strongly recommend this and would be surprised if this was not one of my top reads by the end of the year.