Undercurrent

A book like a beacon, blazing with love and anger for how it is to grow up poor and full of serious ambition in a place others use as a playground. Carthew's unbreakable commitment to making art from the outside edge of social provision is a rallying call to all of us who grew up pushed to the margins. This is a fierce, inspiring story

Tanya Shadrick

Poetic, political and powerful, Natasha Carthew weaves lyrical and sensual nature writing with the tough realities of growing up in poverty

Chloe Timms

A compelling counterbalance to the conventional Cornish story, Undercurrent takes the reader into a side of Cornwall that is rarely presented to the outside world. Natasha Carthew, in scintillating prose, recounts her childhood by the sea, in a place full of dazzling natural beauty, but with a dark side of poverty, inequality and lack of opportunity. Her moving story of finding a way to become a writer is both a testament to her strength, and a passionate call for social justice for disadvantaged rural communities

Sophie Pierce

Railing against the brutal unfairness of accepting the life she seems condemned to lead, Natasha weaves an exhilarating story of escaping the dangerous undercurrents of her life and becoming the writer she was always meant to be. I was with her until the end

Linda Gask

Carthew shows us Cornwall as it often lived but rarely seen, where the rich holiday and others struggle to survive. It's a tale of two counties with the ever-changing sea as a constant. It is a story of queer resistance, of community and of finding your own voice

Damian Barr

By turns marvellous, moving, & mesmerising

Anita Sethi

A fierce, urgent memoir by one of our most important writers. Natasha Carthew is a warrior you'd want on your side in almost any battle, but more important, she is a torchbearer. If you want to understand life in rural Britain, look where she casts her light.

Amy-Jane Beer

This important and beautifully lyrical book asks questions about identity, belonging and the ability of words to transform a life

The Times

A simmering dissection of rural poverty

Luke Turner

Beautiful and lyrical, Undercurrent explores the world of rural poverty with both striking honesty and heart. There is no other writer like Carthew

Mahsuda Snaith

Undercurrent is a fierce and different kind of nature writing, where the wildness is within as well as without: the life you're dealt, and how you manage it - survival, resourcefulness, protection, the ferocity and necessity of having an escape-dream, and the discovery of self-expression through creativity. Delivered in wave upon wave of the flotsam and jetsam, light through water, love, chaos, lack and rage, of trauma, abandonment and poverty in a rural, working class life.
An eloquent shouting into the storm, there are quiet coves, where the wild beauty of a 'destination' landscape contrasts with deep and damaging eddies of deprivation. It is also a lifting of the eyes, heart and hope above the horizon, through the life-changing power and importance of literacy, cultural capital and the mobile library, as a means of freedom and opportunity.
It's the paradox of how to love a place you belong to but cannot dwell in (that hurts you) and the need to escape it.
Brace yourself. It left me breathless, and more determined than ever, to be a good and relevant school librarian.

Nicola Chester

This is an absolutely brilliant, essential book. I am only halfway through and can already tell it will change my heart and mind

Lucia Osborne-Crowley

The most lyrical description of Cornwall I have ever read... highly recommended

The Tablet

A proud, defiant account and despite all the bluster and squalls, Carthew is walking fire, fury and sinew, and yet not afraid to show her more vulnerable underbelly. One thing is clear - that this book is also about love. Familial love, love of community, platonic love, unrequited love, love of words, poetry, people and place - but where her words really sing is in her love of Cornwall, its coastlines, laneways, open skies and hidden places - places she wants to survive and thrive

Caught by the River

A vivid story of hope, beauty and resilience

Manx Independent

Charged with the power of nature, writing and little-heard rural working-class voices, this beautiful memoir is an ode to Cornwall, creativity, and resilience

Love Reading

Ferocious . . . A story of humour, resilience and doing things 'with Kernewek pride'

TLS

Carthew's fierce and honest memoir of her childhood and teenage years reveals the precarious nature of working-class life in a county where dazzling wealth and natural beauty rub shoulders with dark, grinding poverty. This is an inspiring tale of resilience founded on humour, poetry and love of nature

BBC Countryfile Magazine