num_pages: 304
description: Part travelogue part memoir The Fish Ladder is a deeply moving story of an adoptees search for personal identity set against a backdrop of the finest British nature writing.Katharine Norbury was abandoned as a baby in a Liverpool convent. Raised by a loving adoptive family she grew into a wanderer drawn by the landscape of the British countryside.One summer following the miscarriage of a much-longed-for child Katharine sets outaccompanied by her nine-year-old daughter Eviewith the idea of following a river from the sea to its source. The luminously observed landscape grounds the walkers providing both a constant and a context to their expeditions. But what begins as a diversion from grief evolves into a journey to the source of life itself: a life threatening illness forces Katharine to seek a genetic medical history and this new and unexpected path delivers her to the door of the woman who abandoned her all those years ago.Combining travelogue memoir exquisite nature writing and fragments of poems with tales from Celtic mythology The Fish Ladder has a rare emotional resonance. It is a portrait of motherhood of a literary marriage a hymn to the adoptive family but perhaps most of all it is an exploration of the extraordinary majesty of the natural world. Imbued with a keen and joyful intelligence this original and life-affirming book is set to become a classic of its genre.
language: English
title: The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream
publisher: Bloomsbury USA