THE RIVER

Latvian author Vinogradova explores the aftermath of loss in this award-winning novel about a woman whose sister disappears.

The reader first encounters Rute through her sister Dina’s eyes. To Dina—lonely and struggling, haunted by the traumatic childhood the two endured—her younger sister seems spoiled; Rute has a loving husband and a beautiful home with heated floors. The next chapter jumps forward in time: Dina has been missing for 10 years, and Rute has fallen apart. Instead of the house with the heated floors, she’s staying in a dilapidated cabin inherited from the father she and Dina never knew. Unsure if Dina is alive or dead, Rute writes her letter after letter. “Yesterday I thought the river might be in pain,” she writes of the waterway beside the cabin.“That it carries too much.” Pulled unwillingly into the lives of a pregnant neighbor with a small son and her seafaring brother, Rute comes to learn more about her own father, and ultimately about herself. Vinogradova, who has written for children as well as adults, has a straightforward, unadorned style and an expansive empathy for her characters. Everyone in the book struggles in their own ways, from Rute’s neighbors to her husband back in Riga, to the incarcerated mother Rute visits in prison. No one has it easy; no one is actually “spoiled.” The brutality of life is ever-present and matter-of-fact. Children are neglected, unwanted kittens drowned in a bag. But there’s kindness and beauty as well. The river keeps flowing. “Pain gives birth to pain,” Rute writes to her sister later in the book. “…But is reality just pain? Is there a school for laughter? If there was I think I’d like to sign up.”

A moving portrait of a woman slowly making her unsteady way toward connection and the possibility of happiness.