Water Ways

Tears come. “Unable to go further,” Lucy Frost gives in to the emotion and the weeping. Having reached an emotional and intellectual impasse, the amateur historian is exhausted and “bitterly disappointed” in herself. Her subject — her great-aunt Em’s archive of unfinished writing — evades her. “I came too late to this work, and too tired,” she concedes, mourning her inability to bring the material to life, to fulfill the bold promise that she made to herself so many months earlier: “I would do the research and write her book.”

Lisa Robertson’s Riverwork ends where it begins — in lateness. “I arrived by word of mouth,” read the opening lines. “I was serious and skint, and my morals were lax. I was late. I refused to know my place.” What follows is a series of false starts and attempts to transcribe and make sense of a mess of notes. Before her disappearance, Em had spent decades producing and gathering fragments on the Bièvre — a lost tributary of the...