As a baby Katharine Norbury was abandoned in a Liverpool convent. Raised by a loving adoptive family, she was always a wanderer, a roamer, drawn to the ancient paths of the British countryside.
One summer, following the miscarriage of a much-longed-for child, Katharine sets out - often accompanied by her nine year old daughter, Evie - to follow watercourses from the sea to their source. The luminously observed landscape grounds the walkers, earths them, providing both a constant, and a context to their wanderings. But what begins as a diversion from grief soon evolves into a journey to the source of life itself, and to the door of the woman who abandoned her.
Combining travelogue with memoir, exquisite nature writing and fragments of poems and tales from Celtic mythology, The Fish Ladder has a rare emotional resonance as it explores the relationship between adoptee and adoptive family, motherhood and marriage, life-threatening illness and the extraordinary majesty of the natural world.
