Publisher's Description

She awoke in an alley to the splash of rain. She was naked, a foot-long gash in her back was still bleeding, and her identity implant was gone. Lore Van Oesterling had been the daughter of one of the world's most powerful families...and now she was nobody, and she had to hide.

Then out of the rain walked Spanner, predator and thief, who took her in, cared for her wound, and taught her how to reinvent herself again and again. No one could find Lore now: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who had left her in that alley to die. She had escaped...but the cost of her newfound freedom was crime and deception, and she paid it over and over again, until she had become someone she loathed.

Lore had a choice: She could stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner...and risk losing herself forever. Or she could leave Spanner and find herself again by becoming someone else: stealing the identity implant of a dead woman, taking over her life, and creating a new future.

But to start again, Lore required Spanner's talents--Spanner, who needed her and hated her, and who always had a price. And even as Lore agreed to play Spanner's game one final time, she found that there was still the price of being a Van Oesterling to be paid. Only by confronting her family, her past, and her own demons could Lore meld together who she had once been, who she had become, and the person she intended to be...

Reviews

San Francisco Review of Books
Noirish, mesmerizing...remarkable.


San Francisco Chronicle
With her rich imagination, Griffith has created an intriguing world and a character who not only makes her way through it with boldness and creativity, but takes the time to reflect as she goes. Lore confronts moral dilemmas, faces the pain of her past and eventually finds an identity centered in herself rather than in "that most modern of ectoplasms: electrons and photons that flitted silently across the data nets of the world."


Washington Post
[W]ith her first novel, Ammonite...Griffith revealed herself to be fluent in presenting realistic science and its implications, capable of cinematic clarity in her prose, insightful with emotions and character....Replicating many of her debut's themes and strengths, Slow River nonetheless expands into new territory....Although packed with memorable events--including a thrilling brush with a toxic blowup in a bioremediation plant that reads like an updated version of Lester Del Rey's Nerves (1956)--Slow River is, in tune with its title, a stately, measured voyage down the secret streams inside us all.


Brian Aldiss
Ambitious...remarkable, strikingly described.


Locus
With its persuasive characters trying to form identities in an unstable society, its midnight streets and shabby apartments, and its vast industrial engines, Slow River is a powerful prose poem on issues that are already with us...It's a worthy, and radically different, successor to its author's acclaimed debut.


Charles de Lint, F&SF
Griffith has done a wonderful job... Slow River is a jewel of a book, beautifully written and mature in how it approaches its concepts. It calls light up from the darkest shadows--a light that shines more brightly for having survived and prospered against the odds stacked up against it. In a world that seems forever going more and more awry, we need reminders such as this, and authors such as Griffith to provide them.


Denver Post
Nicola Griffith made a brilliant debut two years ago with the planetary exploration novel Ammonite. Her second book is an equally brilliant but very different story of the near future and one woman's search for an identity. Slow River extrapolates changes in biology, computers and drugs in the day-after-tomorrow fashion of Bruce Sterling. Slow River moves swiftly but is also deceptively deep and thoughtful.


David Langford, in SFX
Credible internet charity scams, kidnapping, fashionable designer drugs, sex, sadism, advanced digital porn, sabotage, information and identity theft--all solidly human, without the easy dazzle of cyberpunk cliche. There are no disposable characters either. Real life isn't as cheap as some fiction would have us believe. Slow River is an extremely mature SF novel which pulls off the difficult trick of combining a solidly decent moral stance with compelling readability. I was impressed.


Lambda Book Report
No second-novel slump for English-born Nicola Griffith, whose first novel, Ammonite, won both a Lammy and science fiction's Tiptree Award....In both theme and imagery, Slow River invites comparison to such death-and-rebirth epics as the Sumerian descent of Inanna or the attempt of Orpheus to bring Eurydice back from Hades...Rarely has this reviewer wished so fervently for a sequel!


Dorothy Allison
An astonishing piece of work.


SF Age
The novel's gestalt is realized with depth and subtlety. The science is right, the understanding of interlocking systems is viscerally correct. This is a world, complete with cracks in the sidewalk, stray cats, human folly and wisdom, and the selective blindnesses that complicate existence. Slow River is graceful and seductive. The background and foreground work seamlessly...Lore's story embodies all things human, including science and the moral imperative which fall out if its proper practice. It is the best kind of science fiction, and, finally, the best kind of literature. In the end it is reaffirming of our humanness.

Awards

• winner, Nebula award
• winner, Lambda Literary Award
• winner, Spectrum Award