Selim Farouk has written the rare novel that earns its length. The Weight of Water spans three generations of a family in a river town slowly losing its river, and it never once mistakes size for significance.
The prose is patient to the point of stubbornness. Farouk will spend a page on the way light falls across a dry riverbed, and by the end you understand why: the landscape is the family, and its slow ruin is theirs.
It is a book about scarcity written with an almost embarrassing abundance of feeling.
If there is a flaw, it is that the final section resolves a little too neatly for a novel that has spent four hundred pages insisting nothing resolves. It is a small complaint against a large achievement.
