Spin of the Sunwheel

‘You mustn’t worry, after all, I’ll soon be sixteen...’ Thus Gwen to her parents as they leave her (and Den the dog) on the Thames on their boat Brigantia while they go to visit a dying Grandad. But shortly after their departure there is an accident at one of the locks and Gwen finds herself being rescued by an apparition called Brigid, oddly insistent on referring to our heroine as ‘Guendoloen’. What follows is a fantasy tale of river gods, goddesses and their ghosts, where Gwen is ‘sucked into a vortex’ of the past. Sometimes quite gripping, sometimes melodramatically overwritten, this is an uneven, but intermittently engaging, novel.