Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

Wonderful…I was hooked from the first page. Barney has the real novelist’s ability to inhabit different characters, and to make the texture of life tangible and compelling. Everything he writes about love, loss, grief, desolation, and moments of hope and illumination rings absolutely true. It’s the real stuff. – Michael Frayn
Remember the name Barney Norris. He’s a new writer in his mid-twenties, but already outstanding. * Times *
Looks well beyond the literary intelligentsia’s world, describing with great humanity five ordinary lives, and coming close, as it does so, to being a “state of the nation” novel – albeit one with none of the bombast the term usually implies…deeply affecting…a tolerant and insightful debut * Guardian *
Barney Norris is a rare and precious talent…a writer-chronicler to be cherished. * Evening Standard *
Outstanding…a moving, strangely uplifting novel that grapples with the coarse substance of everyday existence and poetically celebrates its passage. Superb. * Mail on Sunday *
Extraordinarily involving and perceptive…a picture of a society evoked through its injured members. A most remarkable book. – Bernard O’Donoghue
Norris has a gift for tapping in to ordinary lives and finding the extraordinary in them…emotional, compelling and thought-provoking * Daily Mail *
Barney Norris’ first novel has the deep emotional power and accuracy of his admired plays, and more: a sweeping study of how, in everyone’s lives, memory and imagination may intersect with chance. – David Hare
Compelling…Norris never loses sight of the love there is to be found in the world as long as one is willing to seek it out and fight to keep it. * Evening Standard *
Brilliant and multi-layered…the author has an uncanny ability to capture even the tiniest nuances of each character * The Herald *

Barney Norris has been the recipient of the International Theatre Institute’s Award for Excellence, the Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright, a South Bank Sky Arts Times Breakthrough Award, an Evening Standard Progress 1000 Award, a Betty Trask Award and the Northern Ireland One Book Award. His work has been translated into eight languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, teaches Creative Writing at the University of Oxford where he is the Martin Esslin Playwright in Residence at Keble College, Oxford, and regularly reviews fiction for the Guardian.

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