Pondweed
A love story in the slow lane about loss and getting lost—two childhood sweethearts take a trip via pints, ponds and pitstops to find their future on a road less travelled from Stoke-on-Trent to Wales.
It begins one Monday afternoon, around three o’clock. Pond supplies salesman Selwyn Robby arrives home towing the Toogood Aquatics exhibition caravan and orders his like-wife, Imogen ‘Ginny’ Dare, to get into the car. He’s taking her on a little holiday, he says. To Wales.
So begins their road trip west, via blasts from Selwyn’s past, and a fortnight’s journey of self-discovery for them both. But it’s a fishy business towing this caravan, with its saucy mermaid curtains and fully stocked bar, and Ginny must untangle the pondweed to get to the bottom of it, even it does mean unearthing her own murky past to find out.
“Lisa Blower takes us on a mysterious quest along the dual carriageways and B roads of the West Midlands. Her great talent is to make compelling characters of normal people, and show us all the strangeness they contain.”
Chris Power
“A novel that dares to find the lyrical, the luminous and the hilarious in the kind of people and places that literature often overlooks. Down arterial roads and a variety of stops and diversions, Pondweed maps out an unsentimental love story via an unconventional road movie and finds humour and enlightenment in a Britain of caravans and out-of-town aquatics dealers.”
Stuart Maconie
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