Limen

When two women and a dog set off on a holiday, they have no inkling of what’s to come. They wake to find the river has crept up silently during the night. Trapped by floodwater, they devise escape routes only to be faced with more obstacles at every turn. Only the dog remains calm. This poetic novella grips you with its language, its pace, and its anxieties. The word limen is defined as “a threshold below which a stimulus is not perceived.” In Susan’s Hawthorne’s verse novel, there is the threat of the rising waters—the women’s safety is above the threshold of perception. This definition feeds the suspense and tension of this book. However, the word also suggests a transition, a state, a threshold between earth and sky, between day and night, between water and heat, survival and drowning—and it is these paired states, together with many more that also drive narrative.