Pirates Of Water

The premise arrived whole, on a train, during the third dry summer in a row: what if rain were cargo? Pirates Of Water follows the crew of the Merrow as they run stolen weather up a shrinking river, one barrel at a time, to towns that can no longer afford the official price.

Nell is fifteen when she joins them and quite certain that taking from the rich is simple arithmetic. The novel spends four hundred pages complicating that certainty without ever quite refuting it, which is the closest thing to a political position I am willing to hold in fiction.

“Every barrel had a rightful owner, Nell had been told, and it took her most of that summer to notice that nobody could ever agree on who the river itself belonged to.”

It is the most propulsive book I have written. There are chases, a genuinely villainous harbourmaster, and a storm sequence I rewrote eleven times. There is also a long quiet chapter in the middle, on a sandbank at night, which several readers have told me is their favourite thing I have published.

Adventure novels are often accused of being escapist. I would argue the opposite. You cannot write about a stolen river without writing about who was allowed to own it first.