We all lose ourselves in books. Sometimes, we find ourselves in them too.

Occasionally, a book will land in your lap like a bottle washed up by the tide, with a message that seems intended specifically for you, just at that particular point. I remember, for example, reading Orhan Pamuk’s little-known novel A New Life in the first few days after giving birth. The words seemed to scorch the page, incandescent. Going back to it a few years later, it seemed like another book entirely: flat, sombre, with none of that shocked rawness that so vividly mirrored my own post-partum state.

Sometimes, a book will fall open and you’ll read something that seems to be particularly prescient. It might be the Bible; it might be Who Moved My Cheese? or something else entirely. In the Chinese Book of Changes, is an entire cosmology powered by the human tendency to ‘read into’ things: to be especially alert to signs and wonders. The hexagrams I Ching work like needles of truth in the haystack of obscurity. Or something.

All of which leads me to why I am here, in the back garden of my mum and dad’s house in the unremarkable corner of semi-rural Buckinghamshire where I grew up, reading Katherine Norbury’s The Fish Ladder . Coincidence...?

A fish ladder, in case you didn’t know, is a series of raised tanks built into a river, to encourage or enable salmon to swim upstream around an obstacle — for example, a dam. The definition on the opening page elaborates: “The velocity of water falling over the steps has to be great enough to attract fish to the ladder, but it cannot be so great that it washes them back downstream, or exhausts them to the point of inability to continue their journey upriver.” This Nietszchean ichthyology is quite appealing: I imagine the salmon flexing their muscled flanks as they power their way upriver to spawn, chanting, ‘That which does not kill us makes us stronger’ in a booming fishy chorus.

It’s the perfect metaphor for Katherine Norbury’s quest to find her own origins. She journeys back the way she came, like a salmon swimming upriver, to try and understand the “slight unorthodoxy about my beginning”. She was adopted as a baby and never knew who her birth parents were. When a series of encounters with mortality — the death of her father, the stillbirth of her second child, the near-death of her mother, her own brush with a particularly virulent form of breast cancer — force her to ask the big questions (who am I? where do I come from?), she embarks on a series of walks, along with her young daughter, to trace rivers to their source. In the process, she discovers many things about her own, including the identity of her long-lost mother.

The Scottish writer Neil M Gunn’s 1951 novel, The Well at the World’s End , acts like a shadow-companion to Norbury’s fishy memoir. A series of coincidences involving the book confirm, reconfirm and direct her own literal and literary journeys. On one occasion, she randomly opens another of Gunn’s books, and comes across a character explaining his plans for the summer: “I intend to walk a certain river to its source. It’s a thing I have wanted to do for a long time…” It’s one of those message-bottle-shore-feet, penny-drop moments.

There are inevitable comparisons between The Fish Ladder and Helen Macdonald’s Costa Book prize-winning memoir, H is for Hawk , published the previous year.

Both are books about nature, both are books about grief and depression and madness, both are books about fathers and daughters, about parenting and being parented and how that works, or doesn’t. Both are books — in a sense — about being haunted by other writers: Gunn for Norbury, and TH White for Macdonald. Both are women.

Sitting here, writing this, I am aware that I’m having my own little haunting.

The very ‘fish ladder’ that runs through the book, providing its bony spine, seems an apt metaphor for my own peregrinations — to India, to where I was born, and then recently back to England, where I was raised — although which is upstream and which is downriver is sometimes hard to tell. It’s a muddy confluence, mostly.

Oh, did I mention? My parents’ house is all packed up. We’re selling the place and relocating further southwest. My father looks awfully frail these days.

Our rivers these days seem to be mostly metaphorical: the Rubicon and the Styx, perhaps. Or maybe it’s just the sea, at the end of the day and after all.

Anita Roy is a writer, editor and publisher; www.anitaroy.net

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