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.
Industry Reviews
'Funny, moving, philosophical and wise. A road trip through life, loss, and the murky depths of the human heart. Utterly charming and utterly hilarious.' - Emma Jane Unsworth. 'In Pondweed, Lisa Blower takes us on a mysterious quest along the dual carriageways and B roads of the West Midlands. Her great talent is to make compelling characters of normal people, and show us all the strangeness they contain.' - Chris Power, author of Mother. 'Lisa Blower is a highly regarded short-story writer whose new novel tells the tale of an unlikely road trip undertaken by Selwyn and Ginny, two endearing and idiosyncratic sixty-somethings. Blower has drawn an unlikely romance between two people who are meant for each other, but don't know how to be together.' - Dan Brotzel, I News. 'Every once in a while you come across a book which is riveting from the first page. The words entrap you completely, leaving you in a state of reverie. I can say without reservation that this title lived up to the hype for me. Blower powerfully captures a kaleidoscope of emotions as the characters continue to work through the tiffs, reflect on their patterns and discover their way back to each other. She has knit together an extremely raw and moving narrative. Pondweed is unlike anything that I have read and it exceeded all my expectations. Achingly beautiful storytelling and a greatly humanizing portrait of love and loss.' - The Biblio Sara. 'The characters in this novel are just fascinating - particularly Ginny. At first the past is murky, hidden in the depths of the novel, until their voyage gradually untangles it (reminiscent of Selwyn's beloved pondweed). I loved the gentle twists and turns, as our perceptions of the characters and their actions gradually evolve with the novel.' - Sophie Jo Books. 'This was so different from anything I've read lately and it was such a welcome surprise for me. In equal parts charming and emotive, this story always had my attention and I always found myself wanting to know what was going to happen next to these two... This would make a really good T.V. programme I reckon, one I'd watch for sure.' - My Bookworm Life. 'Edgy, raw and just a little bit dark Lisa Blower's prose is biting and fresh. This is a book that makes you work, and it's a joy. It is a book to lose yourself in, filled with simple yet devastating truths and razor-sharp observations. And it is funny, laugh out loud funny. In that way that snatches of life and overheard conversations take on meaning and mirth. For every pool of darkness, there is a glorious patch of light. Without a doubt one of my reads of the year.' - Bookbound. 'Her characters are wry and complex, despite the apparent mundanity of their surroundings.' - Big Issue North. 'Pondweed is superb and I was entirely drawn in. Lisa Blower has the knack of making the most mundane and unlikely worlds become full of depth and colour. The concept is high comedy but these folk become so quickly, quietly tragic and more tragic because they had so little to lose in the first place, and yet somehow managed to lose it. This is a delicate, careful novel about people we are forced to care about.' - Writing West Midlands. 'Lisa Blower is an excellent storyteller. It's a phenomenal talent, to be able to make people care about the history of people that they don't necessarily even like that much, and Lisa manages it brilliantly.' - Ninja Book Box. 'A novel that dares to find the lyrical, the luminous and the hilarious in the kind of people and places that literature often overlooks. Down arterial roads and a variety of stops and diversions, Pondweed maps out an unsentimental love story via an unconventional road movie and finds humour and enlightenment in a Britain of caravans and out-of-town aquatics dealers.' - Stuart Maconie. 'Read all of Pondweed yesterday. Bloody loved it! I miss Selwyn and Ginny already.' - Bookish Chat. 'Her stories are at times the laugh-out-loud funny of Alan Bennett and at others, the achingly sad of the great, David Constantine.' - Paul McVeigh. 'A tale of the extraordinary within the ordinary is clearly signposted by the premise of an unexpected journey in an unlikely caravan, by Ginny saying of Selwyn that "the world had pushed him to one side, as it had with me" and by the sparkling, dancing quality of Blower's writing. "I once read that you can kill a man with a single blow to the temple with a frozen sausage," says Ginny, in an early laugh-out-loud moment. Blower's sketches of minor characters are delicious [and] her taste for drama, when present in her scene descriptions and characters, works brilliantly.' - New Welsh Review.
