The Frozen Thames.

Naomi Brun is a freelance writer and a book reviewer for The Hamilton
Spectator.

Helen Humphreys is a celebrated novelist. Among her works, Leaving Earth was declared a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won the City of Toronto Book Award in 1998; Afterimage merited the Rogers Trust Fiction Prize in 2000; The Lost Garden was a finalist in the 2003 CBC Canada Reads Competition, a national bestseller, and a New York Times Notable Book; and Wild Dogs won the 2005 Lambda Prize for fiction. The Frozen Thames, Humphreys’s first work of creative non-fiction, was a number one national bestseller in 2007.

Humphreys was born in Kingston-On-Thames, England, and now resides in Kingston, Ontario. England, then, is a part of her history, and certainly figures prominently in her writing. In The Frozen Thames, Humphreys has assembled 40 sketches of English life at the moments when the Thames froze over. Beginning in 1142 and ending in 1895, the freezing of the Thames often threw the country into a state of crisis, and Humphreys’s vignettes clearly depict this anxiety, on both a small and large scale. There are scenes of national importance, as in Queen Elizabeth’s impending death in 1608, and scenes of common tragedies, like the breakdown of a marriage in 1434. Sometimes, the freezing was the direct cause of a great emergency, like in 1282, when London Bridge collapsed, killing thousands of the people who lived within its walls. Other times, the freezing of the river was not so much the cause of a problem as it was a reflection of an existing catastrophe, like the time the river froze in 1363 as the Black Death was wiping out the English population. The Thames, though frozen, weaves throughout all of these sketches, binding them together into a cohesive whole.

            The Frozen Thames is haunting, enchanting, and exquisitely beautiful. It presents English history to the reader in an unforgettable way, and through Humphreys’s narrative voice, breathes life into long-known dates and names. This work is a triumph, and of interest to any reader with literary tastes.