Review: Water Shall Refuse Them by Lucie McKnight Hardy

August 10, 2020

"...eventually the rain must come and we will all know the truth."

 

Exciting, unsettling and drenched in barbarity the reader becomes the hardened ground the summer of ‘76 endured.

In this fascinating debut novel, McKnight Hardy provides us with a coming of age story that is beautifully entwined in horror. Nif is a teenage girl sitting in her parents car on the way to a small Welsh village during the heatwave of 1976. Her mother is struggling to cope with the death of her youngest daughter Petra, and her father is struggling to hold the family together. The holiday to Wales is her father’s attempt to get the family back to normal.

In the wake of her younger sister’s death, Nif has found ‘the Creed’, a set of rules to live by that will help her to understand what happened the night of her sister’s death. Why had her mother gone to answer the phone when her four-year-old child was in the bath? Who was on the phone? Why was it so important? Nif befriends the next door neighbour of their holiday home, Mally, who gives her the last ‘relic’ she needs to complete the incantation.

In this sensational novel, McKnight Hardy allows us drips of information both in passing comments and explicit clues, but eventually the rain must come and we will all know the truth.

Grab yourself a copy here: Water Shall Refuse Them

Spotlight on Indie Publishers

Water Shall Refuse Them is published by Dead Ink, an independent publisher in the UK who features in our spotlight on Indie Publishers. To see more books by indepdent publishers head here: Spotlight on Indie Publishers

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