At the heart of this shimmering marvel of a book sits an unexpected relationship, a brief, intense love affair between highly unusual lovers whose lives drift together like sea-wrack.

The incantation Nefyn uses to evoke the storm that enables Hamza’s escape is from a collection of Medieval Welsh manuscripts known as the Myvyrian Archaiology. The novel opens in a wind-torn cove, a place where the reclusive Nefyn loiters to collect “shells and whelks, egg cases and seeds”. Even he played it ‘careful with Nefyn’ because she has no cloak he could have stolen and hidden, as he did with her mother. The ‘Muslim Council of Britain analysed 11,000 UK […] articles’ and found The Mail on Sunday had the ‘most negative coverage, with 78% of its Muslim-based stories containing negative themes, compared to the industry average, itself of 59%. I think so, and unfortunately it seems even more relevant than when I wrote it, with what’s happening in Ukraine.Lewis mainly uses the military, the story’s antagonist, to explore how roughly refugees such as Hamza are handled and regarded. Another issue was that I never fully connected with Nefyn and Hamza as characters, and the book felt too short to properly develop a convincing romance. There are magic realism elements to the story – which is usually a hard no for me - but they really work in this instance. Drift centres on the relationship between a Syrian man and a being who we first perceive as a Welsh woman. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you.

Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www. In a culture awash with the plotless un-novel, it’s refreshing to see the folkloric blended with hard-nosed themes, persuasive proof that a novel need not be just one thing or another. It seems quite a rustic way of going about it, when they’ve got all this sophistication and technology, but it’s actually knowing a place that they’re missing completely, and that’s what war does. In expert strokes, Lewis conjures a pallid and monochrome world where rain needles and waves crash – the sea seizing “the foolish, the reckless and the unlucky”. For example, it’s not said whether Arianell, Nefyn and Joseph’s mother, is a selkie, but it is implied, since selkies are known for their cloaks: ‘She had a cloak; when he caught her, he hid it.

In addition, the Wales Arts Review’s People’s Choice Award and Golwg360’s Barn y Bobl Award winners were announced, revealing which books were the favourites among the public. And to be present in conversations, to be visible in conversations I think is important as we develop as a nation. Nefyn has always been an enigma, even to her brother Joseph with whom she lives in a small cottage above a blustery cove. The rescued castaway who bears witness to this turns out to be a Syrian mapmaker who has suffered immense loss at the hands of the Syrian civil war, and who finds solace in the connection that he and Nefyn share.

Moving between the wild Welsh coast and war-torn Syria, Drift is a love story with a difference, a hypnotic tale of lost identity, the quest for home and the wondrous resilience of the human spirit. To witness how Folklore dances along with issues that concern us all: racism, cruelty, loss, the daily struggle to survive. Hamza’s story actually sprang from me visiting a very high-percentage Welsh-speaking town, and hearing a man speaking Welsh with a really distinctive accent. Tylwyth Teg means ‘the fair people’, and they’re actually incredibly dark and brutal, they’re not nice fairies at all, and the mermaids here tend to have quite a dark edge to them as well, which personally I find more engaging, somehow, than the pretty girls on rocks.

He didn’t question it, he just said, “Well this is where we live, this is where I am now, and this is the language that will connect me to the people and to the landscape,” and he just learnt the language and speaks it fluently.

Drift is best enjoyed taking in the book and audio together, since – while the novel includes deliberately strange elements – there are a few bits I didn’t quite understand until I got the ebook. You adapted your novel Martha, Jac a Sianco for film and have written for the BBC/S4C thrillers Hinterland and Hidden.

It was fairly seamless a process, because I’m quite a fan of letting somebody take ownership of a translation. Hamza detailing the rituals of his religion and joys of a full life created prior to war; Nefyn speaking to Hamza in Welsh, revealing the secrets of her mother who escaped into the waves.