The Water That May Come

The downstairs room at Lark Books in Lincoln was already warm with bookish expectation when the audience reverberated with a low, knowing laugh. On the very day Amy Lilwall was formerly launching her novel The Water That May Come the first named UK storm of the 2025 season, Storm Amy, barrelled its way across the country’s weather maps.

It was the kind of coincidence publicists dream about and authors dread – too on-the-nose to mention, too irresistible to ignore. In my mind it was the kind of fortuitous occasion when art, life and the elements fall into poetic alignment.

Inside, 40 people and a table stacked with freshly printed paperbacks, while outside rain needled the windows, a ready-made metaphor for a book that asks us to measure ourselves against waters that may (or may not) rise.

The evening was guided by Robert Weston, Lilwall’s creative writing colleague at the University of Lincoln, who set a generous tone. He opened with the book’s audacious prologue – told from the point of view of a ‘personified’ volcano – and praised the novel’s “writerly” confidence.

Lilwall, candid and quick to deflate her own mystique, described the prologue as a “prettified info-dump”, before explaining how the science had shifted in development. The idea first clung to the Canary Islands but an editor’s nudge and further research pulled the scenario to Iceland, where warming and glacial rebound render volcanic unrest more than just a gothic flourish. The move matters because it turned a what-if disaster premise into something more contemporary – ‘cli-fi’, if you can cope with that term. And, crucially, made it more political.

That doubleness – the volcano as a foreboding, scene setting character against the background of the climate crisis – runs through the novel’s preoccupations with The Water That May Come tracking four people as Britain looks seawards and flinches. 

Pinko, a rich heir who mistakes decadence for a plan; Jane, a veterinary nurse from a two-up, two-down who is thinking fast because circumstances give her no other choice; Ashleigh, her teenage daughter on the cusp of motherhood; and Gavin, a young artist whose hunches are humble and human-scale.

What gives the book its bite is not apocalypse-as-a-spectacle but pressure-as-a-test. Lilwall is less interested in the bang than in the slow tightening of rules and norms that precede it – the grey zone where everyone is still watching EastEnders and eating beans on toast while new forms of bureaucracy quietly harden around them.

She spoke about “intimacy laws” that haunt the book’s world: couples seeking to migrate are compelled to have intercourse in front of a jury to prove their relationship is “real”. It’s an absurdist idea – she cites the spirit of Lanthimos’s The Lobster – but offers it in deadly seriousness as a mirror to the way asylum processes already strips people naked, demanding testimony of trauma as an admission fee. The extremity shocks precisely because it feels like an extrapolation of something we live with today and forces us into the uncomfortable subjunctive of her title.

Migration is the engine not just backdrop decor for this story. One of Lilwall’s neat reversals is to flip the current right-wing Channel rhetoric by making refugees of Britons and then following the moral and domestic triage that results. Class is the fault line – Pinko has options money can buy; Jane has relationships and wits with little margin for error. The gap between a Tunbridge Wells mansion and a council house in Sittingbourne, Kent, isn’t just scenery, it’s what determines who gets on which boat (or helicopter) and at what cost.

When Rob recalled a line he loved, “Feminism leaves Jane like a stolen soul” you could feel the room register how the book sticks pins in the soft language of principle. Principles are easy in peacetime but much harder when water laps at the door.

Lilwall was frank about the imaginative leap required to write Jane, a character far from her own demographic experience. She didn’t do “fieldwork” in the extractive sense (no interviews to stitch into authenticity). Instead, she built Jane from careful observation and empathy, and – crucially – left space for Jane’s self-awareness. The character knows what she’s doing, knows the compromises and self-bargains she’s making, and the book refuses to judge her for surviving.

A reading from the opening chapter threaded humour through the gloom, and the crowd – students, colleagues, readers – was up for it. A running joke about Paris, the dog (spoiler alert: yes, the dog makes it), gave the evening a pressure-release valve. But even the comedy slides against the grain of the themes.

In a conversation about whether anyone, faced with the end of things, would shrug and “drink all the champagne”, Lilwall argued her characters can’t so easily shed who they are. Even when the world is tilting, habits, loyalties and self-concepts resist – and that friction is where novelistic interest lives.

Publishing, too, is part of the climate of a book, and Lilwall was generous about the process. The Water That May Come is from Manchester-based Fly on the Wall Press, a small imprint with an appetite for political fiction and a knack for turning nimbleness into care.

The book was only accepted for publication in September 2024 and its release this October was speedy by industry standards, going through three rounds of development edits and two rounds of proofs, according to Lilwall.

That blend of speed and rigour shows on the page – a four-character chorus that is ambitious in structure but never confusing; a prose clarity that lets the ethical puzzles shine. The press’s own positioning is plain: political fiction with feminist and quirky undertones, social action in the bloodstream and carbon-neutral production – northern publishing with a point of view.

If you’re looking for a tidy category on your bookshelf, the publisher offers “a rare blend of speculative fiction and literary realism”, in the lineage of The High House and The Last Day. But Lilwall’s novel also feels like it belongs to a different, increasingly visible slot: climate novels about the bit before. Not the catastrophe itself but the time when catastrophe is a credible rumour. Not the fire or flood but the weeks before when people move photo albums upstairs and quietly price life rafts.

The book’s fundamental question – what do you do before the worst happens? – is political because our answers have consequences beyond ourselves. It’s also intimate, because those answers are made one kitchen conversation at a time.

In that sense, the Lincoln Book Festival and Lark Books was exactly the right venue for this launch. Independent bookshops are civic spaces as much as retail rooms, places where a town or city rehearses how it will talk to itself. Watching students lean forward during the Q&A to puzzle over voice, process, responsibility – and to ask how you keep faith with a project over eight years – you could feel the wider frame of the UK migration debate refracted through crafted questions rather than sound-bite slogans. Literature won’t settle policy, but it can make the policy personal enough to resist caricature.

Lilwall hinted, mischievously, at a sister novel – characters glimpsed here stepping forward elsewhere, Paris-the-dog included. The room perked up at the promise of “more naughtiness”, which felt right because the work of dark times needn’t always be sombre. And if there’s a line that does the best job of bottling the book’s moral weather, it’s the one Fly on the Wall chose to trail with its publicity: “In a future where we all may become refugees, how far would you go to stay afloat?”

Walking out at the end of the evening – leaving Lilwall grinning with relief aside a dwindling stack of first edition paperbacks – the rain had eased to a fine mist. It felt like the right departure note for a launch about imminence: no drama, just a change you notice on your skin the second you step into it.

The evening had made me think again about the soft power of fiction, where it dares to be timely without being didactic. If the migration debate in Britain is too often shouted across the gap between myth and data, between right and left, Lilwall’s approach is to tighten the shot, to make the choice a reader’s and to make the river a street you know.

The Water That May Come is a novel of thresholds: between land and sea, between safety and risk, between who you think you are and what you do next. It is also, thankfully, a book with a sense of the ridiculous that keeps you human.

On a night when a namesake storm knocked on the windows, Amy Lilwall offered the kind of story that respects both your intelligence and your fear. The water, like the future, “may come” but the better question is: who do we become while we’re waiting?

  

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

ISBN: 9781915789440
RRP: £12.99

Land of Great Cathedrals

 Review by Ariadne Gallardo Figueroa

This work recounts the two trips made to Nepal facilitated by KE Aventures Travel, undertaken in autumn 2001 and October 2004; the second alongside Tim Scott, an enthusiastic hiker and personal friend of the writer. Soon we will see a more extensive work titled 'Travels in Time and Space' that the writer Clive Simpson is currently preparing. Four decades of travel and writing must be recounted in it.
                    
With an interesting dedication, I have received the book by the renowned author and writer Clive Simpson: “Ariadne, The mountains of your mind, call”. It is therefore the author's central idea when faced with the immensity of the Himalayas. 

Later, his work highlights from the outset the recognition of his parents who urged him from a young age to recognise the power of travel and their enigmatic way of teaching customs and
landscapes that were not. They are common every day.

The back cover surprises with a beautiful epigraph, it is as if the author decided to place a
ribbon around the work before presenting it to the reader subtly and elegantly. It is the also

British John Ruskin who declares: “And of these great cathedrals of the earth, with doors of rocks, pavements of clouds, choirs of steam and stone, altars of snow and a purple vault crossed by the continuous stars.”

I then realize that it is his cultural background and what he learned from his ancestors who have given that mystical and religious character to the adjective that he has given in his title to the large masses of rock that have not been manufactured by human hands but as part of the geological process where orogenesis allows two huge plates of Earth to rise and remain stable for thousands of years.

Many films and books have been written about the Himalayas, each with a different vision. The most revealing thing about each author is that he shows us his vision through words and we are left meditating on the experience that transmits to each of us.

Clive Simpson, who bears in his name the courageous sign of the great mountain crags, points
out that a group had to return to Spain without achieving the objective due to the difficulties in reaching the summit; then he describes the paraphernalia of all the little coloured flags that are moved by the gusts of wind, pointing out that they are still there, that the achievement is possible and that you just have to know when to climb.

Pages later describe in detail the health problems of a young Scotsman who, despite being 19
years old, is under the influence of mountain sickness that causes so much discomfort in those who suffer from it.

The Nepalese slope of Khumbu rises 5,486 meters above sea level, being in front of it must be
an invaluable experience, Clive mentions it, but does not give much information about its
characteristics, perhaps surprised by its majesty, initially points out that it is a sunny day in
November, the mere idea sticks in the mind of the reader and makes us recognize that that
section will not be crossed during the midday thaw.

Before the immeasurable expression of the landscape, Clive Simpson takes a tour of the travel
experience from London airport to the different landscapes and culinary smells that will bring
you closer to a new and different territory, where curry is served regardless of the time of day.
day or night, in the same way, and if dwelling on too many details describes the aviator's ability to achieve manoeuvres that would seem crazy and reckless to the most sensible person.

Kathmandu at 1,400 meters above sea level becomes for them as visitors the threshold to the
mountainous space of the Himalayas, the author describes the artistic nature of its buildings and I imagine that being there arises within their being a hunch of hope and excitement of the
moment of inhaling the icy breath of the ice colossus.

The dense fog southeast of Dhaka in Bangladesh leaves me thinking about those who accompany him, since I only spell “We” at various times, the privacy of the group seems important or the landscape is more captivating than any human being surrounding their path. Without a doubt, the selective vision of the landscape is one of the amazing moments of the experience.

I discover that there are approximately 20 people in addition to the pilot, Clive describes them as 'Virgins of Everest', the phrase seems surprising, placing confidence in the skill of the Yeti Airlines pilot, all of them unknown to the mountain peaks that receive them indifferently.
On the left side of his window, Clive describes the frozen peaks almost touching the aircraft. It
must be a unique sensation to be in the flight of the metallic bird, recognizing the close touch of the imposing cliffs.

The description is so faithful that I feel the hum of the aero motor in my mind, slowly and calmly travelling through that new and surprising space. Changes of ice and cold are carried by hanging notes where in the distance you can hear the thundering water guessing in a gorge and the Sherpa hike leader who gives instructions that just imagining the way he describes them has made me nervous.

For Clive, adrenaline is everything, imagining himself rising with the group to the top
encourages him, and every detail is a new adventure. “Everest” is not everyone a recognized name for the mountain group, among the Nepalese, its name is Sagarmatha and when they get there, they discover a national park protected since 1976, where it is necessary to use Yak dung to heat food. It must be protected as a world heritage site and for this it is necessary to establish ecological care that all hikers should respect.

Sagarmatha is the name in Nepal for this imposing peak. It means “mother of the universe” in
Sanskrit. Along the way we found a pine forest and the 150-meter ascent through the colourful Namche, everything seemed to indicate that life provides enough strength to move forward, but the discomfort arrived and found us in its camp, a painful head with seized some of the hikers, the height subdues the most reckless.

During a journey that seems worthy of the most courageous humans capable of acting in the
face of tremendous cliffs and climatic extremes, David's illness contrasts with the name of the
one who prevailed against Goliath; making a comparison in those latitudes, when it is necessary to take him to a hospital, to receive a second opinion due to the deterioration of his health. The contrast shows the reality of a world that is not made for everyone, regardless of age and vitality.

Something stuck in my mind in a particular way, the moment in which the writer worries about the state of health of the young man who is finally taken to a hospital in Kathmandu, and another detail that seems irrelevant but that shows me Clive's strength when he points out that at a certain height, he decides to use a second pair of socks, I remember my climb to the Nevado de Toluca in my own country and the need to wear mountain boots with three pairs of socks that did not fulfil their purpose and there, I realize that the Himalayas are not for everyone.

It is a feat that deserves patience at every step of the way. Tengboche is a monastery set against the backdrop of the Khunde Canyon. It is located directly adjacent to Khumjung, in the valley at the foot of Khumbu Yül-Lha, the mountain sacred to the Sherpas. The Khumjung Valley is between 3,800 m and 4,000 m above sea level. Khunde is located in the western part of the valley and slightly higher than Khumjung.

Carrying a heavy backpack on your back causes pain in the lower part of the neck, headaches
are a general trigger among hikers who need to hydrate with something that contains sugar, and crossing a raging river over a bridge has to be one of the experiences more powerful, and Clive discovers it in detail, the guide decides, given the group's stomach ailments and headaches, to spend the night in Dingboche.

The encounter with their settlement at 4,267 meters high (approximately 14,000 feet high) leaves many of us readers wanting to see that crescent moon on the shoulders of the mountain, there is no photograph of that fascinating event that remains reserved for the eyes. of hikers, a clear, starry night that perhaps becomes the setting for a peaceful night in the small settlement of stone huts at Ama Dablam.

Ama Dablam is affectionately known as the "Mother's Necklace" among the Sherpas, a term
loaded with cultural meaning. This name is derived from the Sherpa language, where "Ama"
translates as "mother", and "Dablam" refers to a double pendant worn by Sherpa women that
holds images of gods. Without a doubt, the stars fulfil a beautiful image among visitors and this fascinating and traditional necklace.

Approaching the autonomous region of Labouche urges me to imagine that peak recognized as the 93rd mountain peak that has not yet been able to be climbed by humans due to the dangers it implies, being able to see it from the front must have been one of the most impressive events for a British visitor.

The Kala Patthar climb is very popular among trekkers in the Mount Everest region as it offers the clearest view of Everest. Kala Patthar, meaning “black rock” in Nepali and Hindi, is a mountain in the Nepalese Himalayas.

Then the usual breakfast of sweet potatoes and cabbage dwindles to tea and biscuits, and the
climbers' stomachs can't handle it anymore, each journey is a physical effort and an admirable moment for each of them. Just thinking that this path was crossed by the most renowned climbers in the world made the journey full of enthusiasm.

The mere idea of imagining the Sherpas, willing, happy, and accustomed to doing this work
continuously to accompany the intrepid visitors. It is interesting, that Clive discovers it as a sign of humility for each of them. Reaching 5,638 meters, approximately 18 thousand feet high is not something that is told to be left in the memory, documenting it and sharing it is the most fascinating thing that Clive has made us part of a unique event, even though I will always miss the shot of the crescent moon.

*          *          *

This is an un-edited review auto-translated from Spanish and originally published on ‘Letras Creativas con Ariadne Gallardo Figueroa’ blog (April 2024) under the heading “Tierra de Grandes Catedrales”, Reseña a la obra de Clive Simpson.

Click on link to order a limited edition, signed copy of Land of Great Cathedrals

Hidden in plain sight

“I have been a political reporter for almost three decades,” writes Peter Oborne in his new book, “and I have never encountered a senior British politician who lies and fabricates so regularly, so shamelessly and so systematically as Boris Johnson.”

The Assault on Truth - more like a slim dossier with full supporting evidence - attempts to explain the current apparently shambolic state of UK politics, and how Johnson has turned it against itself as he seeks to divide and rule.

In the first part, Oborne uses a mass of irrefutable evidence to prove that Johnson (and most of his senior advisors and ministers) habitually lie, fabricate and misrepresent the facts.

Having built the case, seemingly rather easily it turns out, he examines Johnson’s methodology of deception by selecting some of the most powerful and shocking examples.

Oborne then attempts to answer the question, what led the Conservative party to install such a person as leader and the British people to put an already proven liar in Downing Street?

He suggests that morality in public life (an by inference perhaps society at large too) has changed in recent years, over-turning the protections against deceit and corruption instilled by our Victorian ancestors, many inspired by evangelical Christianity.

“It may be fashionable to mock them today, but the Victorians brought high ideals into government which changed the way that Britain was ruled,” he writes.

Oborne also claims - and he should know, having worked on both the Telegraph and Spectator (the latter under Johnson as editor) - that “a great deal of political journalism has become the putrid face of a corrupt government” flying in the face of the only valid reason to become a journalist, which is “to tell the truth”.

He writes: “Too much of the political class have merged. And this unnatural amalgamation has converted truth into falsehood, while lies have become truth.”

Much of the documented evidence in The Assault on Truth is both difficult to deny (although it has become the duty of Johnson’s ministers daily to defend the indefensible) and shocking at the same time.

With forensic dissection, Oborne notes the small and large steps along the twisting path of 21st century politics to the place we have sadly arrived at today, where lies and trite, three-word slogans rule over difficult or politically complex areas.

Johnson is presented as an ambitious, self-seeking politician whose campaigning exuberance and populist comic polemic character is gradually being undermined by “incompetence and dishonesty in high office”.

But while there is little doubt that Johnson is both deceitful and amoral, Oborne says the prime minister’s war on truth is also part of a wider, largely right-wing, attack on the pillars of democracy, which includes Parliament, the rule of law and the civil service.

Oborne is honest enough to admit that he has changed his own mind on Brexit since voting for it in the 2016 referendum. Given his calibre as a journalist and his lifelong pursuit of the truth the only surprise in this is that he did not see through the blatant lies of the Vote Leave campaign at the time.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing in this book is not that Johnson is a habitual liar (though that is bad enough) but that, as a society, the UK has been prepared to protect (via the media) and support (by the public) him and his government in it.

Ultimately, the consequences of allowing such political trickery and wickedness to go unchallenged and unchecked for so long are grave indeed.

 

 

 

 

 

The Assault on Truth - Peter Oborne (2021)

Best purchased from your local, independent bookshop.