A perceptive, moving novel about life and death in the Basque Country,
from the author of Nevada Days.
Bernardo Atxaga's Water over Stones follows a group of interconnected
people in a small village in the Basque Country. It opens with the story
of a young boy who has returned from his French boarding school to his
uncle's bakery, where his family hopes he will speak again. He's been
silent since an incident in which he threw a stone at a teacher for
reasons unknown. With the assistance of twin brothers who take him to a
river in the forest, he'll recover his speech. As the years pass, those
twins, now adults, will be part of a mining strike in the Ugarte region,
and so take up the mantle of the narrative, just as others will after
them.
Water over Stones is similar in nature to Atxaga's earlier books
Obabakoak and The Accordionist's Son, as it weaves in themes of
friendship, nature, and death. Yet in capturing a span of time from the
early 1970s, when the shadow of the Franco dictatorship still loomed, to
2017, when these boys must learn to leave their old beliefs behind and
move on, Atxaga finds new richness and depth in familiar subjects. As
threads of water run over stones in the river, so these lives run
together, and, over time, technology and industry bring new changes as
the wheel of life turns.
