The Stream

Winner of the Author's Club Best First Novel Award as well as the first novel to ever win Britain's premier literary environmental award--the BP Natural World Book Prize, known as the "Green Booker"--Brian Clarke's The Stream is a finely drawn portrait of a small cross-section of the environment experiencing the conflict between development and conservation. Apart from a few protesters, the announcement of an industrial park in a depressed rural area is widely welcomed. It promises new jobs and new hope for those who live there. A few miles away, in a small valley with a stream running through it, ownership of a farm passes from father to son. Over time, these two events take their toll. The pressures are felt most powerfully in the stream itself as, little by little, the creatures that live in it are sucked into a mute and unseen struggle for survival. With grace and objectivity, and with a narrative rhythm echoing the patterns of nature, The Stream records the consequences of environmental degradation from the inside. As The Times (London) wrote, this is "a devastatingly effective novel which ought to be required reading for schoolchildren, government ministers, businessmen, environmentalists, and anyone else who has an interest in the environment."