What the River Washed Away by Muriel Mharie Macleod

Life as a black woman in 1920s Louisiana, battling the double-barreled bigotry of race and gender, African-American, but without a true home in either, torn from one and oppressed in the other: Muriel Mharie Macleod's What the River Washed Away is born in the shadow of modern classic The Colour Purple and though it never quite achieves the devastating emotional impact or ontological scope of Alice Walker's acclaimed epistolary novel, it stands as a powerful piece of storytelling in its own right.

Macleod's idiomatic prose is sparse and soulful, telling Arletta's story in an evolving tongue that begins its tale struggling to capture the horrors of a childhood steeped in abuse and neglect in the vocabulary of a semi-educated child and grows across the pages into the stoic, defiant tones of a young woman quietly hell-bent upon her own emancipation from the squalid life the world has tried to force upon her.

Many of its characters, including Arletta herself, remain a little thinly drawn but it's a compelling tale all the same. Pervaded throughout by a dense melancholy punctuated continually by tragedy, reading it makes for an often brutal but ultimaltey rewarding experience. [Ross McIndoe]