Pondweed (Hardback) - Lisa Blower

A love story in the slow lane about loss and getting lost-two childhood sweethearts take a trip via pints, ponds and pitstops to find their future on a road less travelled from Stoke-on-Trent to Wales.

A love story in the slow lane, a road novel from Stoke-on-Trent to Wales, a stolen caravan, and a salesman who kidnaps the love of his life - this is a journey of self-discovery for an odd couple of 60-somethings: childhood sweethearts reunited in later life. One Monday afternoon, around three o'clock, pond supplies salesman Selwyn Robby arrives home towing the Toogood Aquatics exhibition caravan and orders his like-wife, Imogen 'Ginny' Dare, to get into the car. He's taking her on a little holiday, he says. To Wales. So begins their road trip west via ponds, pitstops, and blasts from Selwyn's past. But it's a fishy business towing this caravan with its saucy mermaid curtains, fully stocked bar, and the words 'For your pondlife and beyond' in the slanted red font favoured by Pound shops. And Ginny must untangle the pondweed to get to the bottom of it, even it does mean unearthing her own murky past to find out.

About the Author

Lisa Blower won The Guardian National Short Story Award in 2009, and was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2013 and longlisted for The Sunday Times Short Story Award in 2018. Her fiction has appeared in The Guardian, Comma Press anthologies, The New Welsh Review, The Luminary, Short Story Sunday, and on Radio 4. She is a contributor to Common People edited by Kit de Waal. Her debut novel Sitting Ducks was shortlisted for the inaugural Arnold Bennett Prize 2017 and longlisted for The Guardian Not the Booker 2016. She has a PhD from Bangor University and is now senior lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Wolverhampton University. Her academic interests are the short story, creative nonfiction and working-class fictions. In 2016, Lisa was appointed the first-ever Writer in Residence at Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery. Supported by Arts Council England, the residency enabled her to start her second novel, Green Blind, a contemporary re-imagining of Mary Webb's Gone to Earth that tackles the politics of fracking and land ownership in rural Shropshire. Lisa was producer and curator of the 2015 Wenlock Poetry Festival, hosted a series of Literary Salons and Creative Writing courses for Shropshire Libraries, is a member of Writing West Midlands' Room 204, and Arvon tutor.