Joseph leaves her for weeks at a time, to work the boats further up the coast and bring in a meagre income they can live by. We are pleased that, year-on-year, Wales Book of the Year demonstrates the wealth of literary talent in and from Wales. I just thought it sounds so beautiful, and it connects the Welsh part of the book with something deeper as well. An intimate read- I could imagine this being a made into an ITV drama or staged beautifully as a play.

There is the occasional clang of something culturally familiar (a scene where Nefyn tells a prison guard to walk into the sea feels a little akin to Jedi mind tricks).

A violent storm will bring these two lost souls together—but other forces will soon try to tear them apart. Drift, her debut novel in English, is published by Doubleday/Transworld Digital in hardback, eBook and audio download. And I could feel inside me everyone who was alive and everyone who had ever lived who had felt that way. I am a big lover of fantasy novels, but that was not what I was anticipating with this book, and I think I switched off a bit once this part of the story emerged. At the heart of this shimmering marvel of a book sits an unexpected relationship, a brief, intense love affair between highly unusual lovers whose lives drift together like sea-wrack.

Love and longing collide with these motifs to challenge how one deals with the heaviness of letting go, as Lewis questions if this is ever really the case. They can either earn it back, or more interestingly take it back – I think that’s a better way of going about it.In response, Lewis brings the focus back to the environment, giving power to it, and in turn marginalises our automated existence. It is described as "a love story with a difference, and a hypnotic tale of lost identity, the quest for home and the wondrous resilience of the human spirit". Making them appear so makes us feel better, but they stray into each others' paths, feel the pull of others, and that's the wonder of it. For example, there is quite a bit of telling when it comes to Joseph’s romantic relations and his evening trips to the pub: ‘She had lit like a struck match, her anger flaming, and turned her back on him until he placed his hand on her hip, tugged her towards him.