The Long Pound

She was born on the slow water, and she will not give it up without a fight.

Fifteen-year-old Wren Tace knows every lock, bridge, and hard-won mile of the Aldermere Cut. The horse-boat Bright Annis is the only home she has ever wanted—sixty feet of painted castles and gleaming brass, owned free and clear, beholden to no man for the bed her family sleeps in. That is her whole wealth and her whole pride. But the iron road is coming. Surveyors drive red pegs up her green valley, measuring the canals for their grave, and one frozen winter stands between the Taces and the workhouse.

Then boats begin to sink in accidents no one can explain. A stolen-cargo charge threatens to send Wren's father to gaol. And a rival boatman spits a strange curse across the water—Tace luck—as though there is a darkness stitched into her very name that the whole cut knows, and she does not.

What Wren uncovers is older and colder than sabotage: a lady drowned in Hallow Tunnel sixteen years past, a name scratched from a parish register, and a secret about her own birth that binds her by blood to the very man laying the railway that will end her world. With the help of a clever railway boy who teaches her to read more than the water, she follows the truth toward an inheritance that could save her family—or cost her everything she loves.

Caught between the people who raised her and the future that condemns them, Wren must decide what is worth betraying, and what she will never surrender.

Marielle Hawes writes in a voice as vivid and unhurried as the canals themselves—salt and coal-dust, tar and tenderness, a vanished world summoned back plank by painted plank. The Long Pound is a sweeping, heart-catching novel of the last canal children: those who lived inside a clock they wound by walking, and steered by the small of the back and the soles of the feet.

The water tells your body what it will not tell your eyes.