Out of Fisher’s early novels, this is my perhaps favourite, just because of how evocative the landscape is - a rural Welsh community next to a river prone to flooding.

As he walked around the bend he realised how quiet the night was [...] The road was lonely and empty. In the silence a frog plopped into a reen and suddenly the moon came out, flooding the lane with silver and the fields glinted under their lacework of water - water in ditches and reens, trickling over the tarmac, glittering in ponds and hoofprints and hollows, as if the whole of the Levels was a great black sponge, oozing with silver liquid.

It's not just the occasional poetry of Fisher's prose that I like about her writing, nor her vivid (and picturesque) settings; it's the way she writes about unconventional characters who are confident and comfortable being different from others. Or who are struggling with being different. ( )