156pp., paperback, (Cape Town), 2021
"In this book, Barbara Grenfell Fairhead has successfully captured quicksilver - the inchoate, the unintelligible, the mystery of the landscape of the primordial mind. It is an extraordinary achievement. The only other book that came to mind while reading it is the award-winning book, Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. Her book takes us even deeper into the early landscape of language and the earliest human earth." Julian Roup, author of Life in a Time of Plague
"This remarkable tale is a powerful reimagining of our species' unfolding and its future potential. Rio Abajo Rio is many things at once - part post-creation myth, part evocation of the first words ever spoken, it is simultaneously a projection of a post-apocalyptic society." Liesl Jobson author of Ride the Tortoise
Artist, writer, poet and lyricist Barbara Grenfell Fairhead, lives in Cape Town. Born in the United Kingdom in 1939, she has lived most of her life in South Africa. She is the author of the novels Of Death and Beauty and Whereof One Cannot Speak.