#digital-immigrant — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

Nicola Griffith @[email protected] · 2026-07-19 · 15:48 UTC

Today Only! Slow River = $1.99!

Slow River is on sale today for $1.99 (ebook, North America, all platforms). Today only. This is the cheapest it’s been for (literally) decades. You should go buy it.

US: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Apple | Phinney Books

Why should you buy it? Three reasons. But let’s start with two.

First, most obviously: why not? For that price you can’t even get a cup of coffee. Two, less obviously—much less so for those wo haven’t read it but may have seen it described as something like, “The best-ever novel of sewage and abuse”—this the book of mine that’s come closest (so far) to being turned into a film. Why? Because it’s highly cinematic, and in three different modes. This is because the novel itself is told in three different points-of-view and timelines, each with a different but strong visual and emotional focus.

What It’s About

Here’s the back cover copy:

She wakes in an alley to the splash of rain: naked, the foot-long gash in her back still bleeding, and her identity implant gone. Lore Van de Oest, once the daughter of one of the world’s most powerful families, is now…nobody. And she has to hide.
Then out of the rain walks Spanner, predator and thief, who takes her in, cares for her wound, and teaches her how to reinvent herself again and again. No one can find Lore now: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who left her in that alley to die. She has escaped…but the cost of her newfound freedom is crime and deception, and she pays it, over and over, until she starts to loathe who she’s becoming.
Lore has a choice: She can stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner, and risk losing herself forever. Or she can find herself again—but only by becoming someone else, one last time.

Bright Young Things

The present-tense layer, Lore from age 5 to 18, is all brightly-lit, hot tropical colours under saturated blue skies. Settings range from a private island in the South Pacific to high-tech luxury playgrounds for the rich (one of my favourite scenes: two women swimming naked in pink perfluorocarbon—basically breathing liquid—and having great sex) to massive engineering projects such as the 60m high heliostats cascading with water and the 100-km long transparent pipelines raised on pylons running over the Aralkum Desert (both designed to remediate pollution) and to the stolid, dark wood interiors with rich fabrics of moneyed-for-generations homes in Amsterdam.

Shadowed Streets

The past-tense third-person layer, which follows Lore from 18 to 21, is much more noirish, stylistically. It is set in a poor northern city (Hull) with an ancient heart. Here in its streets at night Lore has to confront the realities of surviving as part of the anonymous underclass. She moves through the seams of society and does things she is not proud of. The flashing lights of a news tank reflect on rain-wet streets; brittle cocktail-party laughter echoes around shiny, soulless bars while hidden from sight there are drug deals for sex and sex for drugs until as the grey northern skies start to lighten towards dawn and the workers climb into their silent sliding public transport, no one knows anymore which is which. And through it all, that river…

Coming into Focus

The third layer—the main layer, the narrative present—is Lore reassessing everything and deciding to start afresh under a new identity without Spanner, and with honest employment: as a grunt in the kind of water treatment plant even one of her family’s underlings would have found beneath their notice. Except as a source of revenue—because Lore’s family owns the patent not only on the genetically modified microbes that transform sewage into potable water but on the necessary cocktail of nutrients the family deliberately engineered those microbes to need. But what do you suppose happens when some low-level manager at the city waterworks decides he can make a little extra by buying off-brand supplies? And how can a supposedly brand-new nobody of an employee make people believe what’s about to go horribly, disastrously wrong without revealing who she really is?

Hope, Hope, and More Hope

All that, of course, is just the plot. The real story is Lore’s journey, emotional and physical, as she goes through a series of identity changes, some out of necessity, some from choice.

Writing this novel was a challenge—and I’m not talking of the technical poetics of how to blend three same-but-different POVs and timelines (which I address in the bonus essay in the new edition). No. I’m talking about this second and third layer, set in a run-down city in a poor region of a poor country suffering the worst of twentieth-turned-to-twenty-first century decaying infrastructure, weaponised web, massive unemployment, and widening income disparity. How do you infuse that urban and moral blight with joy and hope—joy and hope that isn’t delusional but feels solid and grounded? That was the challenge.

And that, dear reader, is why I think this novel is just as, if not even more, relevant today that it was when I wrote it. Lore—like me and many others here in 2026—finds hope and joy, comfort and delight in the small moments: the sudden sun-yellow weed in an acre of crumbling pavement; the bright fluting of bird on the roof; the simple wonder of watching dried soybean uncurl and expand in boiling water, like watching small worlds being born. It’s the little things that matter, and they’re all around us, no matter how bad things may seem.

Oh, and spoiler alert: this story ends well. Just as I suspect our story will, sooner or later.

Buy

US: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Apple | Phinney Books