The Fish Ladder
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Reviews
St Just Monday Morning Reading Group 27th October 2025.
The fish ladder. Katharine Norbury.
This was a slightly enigmatic book which had an ambivalent reception from the reading group. Some readers loved it; others found it hard to engage with; a few did not finish it. Likewise the amount of description in the book was differently received: the consensus was perhaps that the descriptions were wonderful, but they tended to obscure the story. We thought in general that the depictions of the areas she visited in her quest meant more to readers who had also actually visited the locations concerned, than to those who had not.
Comparisons were made with Raynor Winn’s books – Katharine Norbury is obviously writing an autobiography, but she has changed some names in order to preserve anonymity, and does not make a point of proclaiming the truth of her story.
We did agree that this was a very well-written book, courageous and highly personal. But not everyone felt that that she came over as a character as much as might be expected.
We spent some time discussing what we thought was the point of the book. Katharine set off to find the ‘well at the world’s end’, near Dunbeath, Caithness, as depicted by the author Neil Gunn. But she did so in a very indirect way, visiting a number of rivers (Spurn Point in East Yorkshire, St Mary’s Well on the Llyn Peninsula, and the River Severn), and incorporating also the search to find her own birth mother. We concluded that these quests were in some way synonymous.
Katharine’s serious difficulties in life we appreciated and sympathised with: the loss of a baby, subsequent mental and physical health problems, and then the rejection she received from her birth mother when she found her. We discussed the issues of adopted children and their parents, and how often success stories are publicised about this. Katharine’s story was distinctly not such; a very sad one, in fact, though she did find one of her brothers. She was brave to write about all this, we thought. But despite all this and the poetic quality of her writing, for some reason we still weren’t sure that this was a book which ultimately appealed to us.
