A meandering, sometimes melancholy, always charming read that ends on a triumphant note as perhaps all fairy tales should. Setterfield enjoys telling stories about telling stories, and - like The Thirteenth Tale - here convinces that the telling of her tale is more important than the truth of it. That said, while there’s much to enjoy about these riverside character vignettes and minor mysteries I found very little happened for rather a lot of telling; it’s cosy but slow, if quietly satisfying. Luckily it’s also peopled with characters it’s easy to spend time with (Mr Armstrong was a particular favourite). One for whiling away wet evenings (or alternating, as I did, with something more rambunctious).

Do you remember the first time you heard those words: “Once upon a time…” ?

They were magical words.

Words that transported you into new worlds of good fairies and naughty imps; of brave warriors, damsels in distress and knights in shining armour.

As you grew older, fairies and goblin stories lost their appeal. In their place came family stories heard around the dinner table or the camp fire. Stories perhaps of war and adventure, or mysterious events and comic mishaps.

The characters changed and the stories changed. But what never altered was your love of a good yarn.

The characters in Diane Setterfield’s magnificently atmospheric and mysterious novel, Once Upon a River, are lovers of stories too. When the gravel-diggers and bargemen gather around the fire of an ancient inn at Radcot on the Thames, they love to share stories.


Stories keep them entertained on dark and dreary nights. It matters not that they’ve heard them all before: they’ve found new ways to enliven the tales, with ever more outlandish new versions.

None of them, however, came up with a tale as outlandish as the one that began one one winter solstice night.

The regulars at The Swan are indulging in another telling of their favourite story about the battle of Radcot, when the door to the inn bursts open. In staggers a man, soaked through and with his head bashed in. In his arms is what looks like “a large puppet, with waxen face and limbs and sickly painted hair.”

Except it’s not a puppet. It’s a young girl. And everyone in the pub agrees she is dead. Imagine their astonishment when hours later the girl revives.

For weeks afterwards the regulars of the Swan can talk about nothing other than this miracle.

Who is the mysterious girl? The girl herself doesn’t provide any answers since she doesn’t speak. Nor can the injured man help solve the puzzle. He can say only that he found her in floating in the river.

Theories are proposed. Gnawed over. Found wanting.

In the absence of any natural explanation, the villagers begin to wonder if other forces are responsible. Could this be the work of Quietly, a ghostly ferryman who features in many of their fireside stories? When someone gets into trouble on the river, Quietly appears

"… manipulating his pole so masterfully that his punt seemed to glide as if powered by an otherworldly force. He never spoke a word, but guided you safely to the bank so you would live another day."

He’s there to get you safely home. But to whose home does this mysterious child actually belong?

Three people claim she is theirs.

A local couple whose marriage faded when their daughter was kidnapped.

A prosperous mixed race farmer who believes she’s the illegitimate
off- spring of his ne’er do well son.

A simple housekeeper who believes her long dead young sister has returned.

Diane Setterfield takes her time to unravel the answer to this mystery. Just like the river her story “does not seem particularly intent on reaching its destination. Instead “it winds its way in time-wasting loops and diversions.”

That doesn’t mean Once Upon a River is a laborious read however. It’s simply that a leisurely pace works best for a tale that, for all its Gothic elements of mystery and menace, is ultimately about grief.

Sorrow that never fades is experienced acutely by all three families who believe the child is theirs. But is encapsulated best by the father of the kidnapped girl

"He saw her not here, in this room and not now in this hour, but in the infinity of memory. She was lost to life, but in his memory she existed, was present, and he looked at her and her eyes met his and she smiled."

Setterfield situates every aspect of the narrative in relation to The Thames.

It’s too simplistic to say that the river is as much of a character as the regulars at The Swan or the families who vie for the child. But The Thames is certainly a powerful presence, reigning god-like over the villagers of Radcot.

The river finds its way into their wells and is “drawn up to launder petticoats and to be boiled for tea” and ‘from teapot and soup dish, it passes into mouths’. The Thames provides them with transport and an occupation. It nourishes the crops needed to sustain their lives. But it also takes life away.

Once Upon A River is a beautifully crafted novel showing the thin border between the real and the unreal worlds. And how sometimes rational explanations do exist for strange and mysterious events.

For me the greatest pleasure lay in how Diane Setterfield uses the novel to celebrate the traditions of storytelling but also remind us that it’s an artifice.

Faced with a dearth of fact about a boy who died at the Radcot battle, the storytellers turn to invention.

"At each retelling the drinkers raised the unknown boy from the dead in order to inflict upon him a new death. He had died countless times over the years, in ways ever more outlandish and entertaining. When a story is yours to tell you are allowed to take liberties with it…."

Some, like the landlord of The Swan, realise that storytelling is as much about the performance as it is about the narrative.

"With a bit of practice he found he could turn his hand to any kind of tale; whether it be gossip, historic, traditional, folk or fairy. His mobile face could convey surprise, trepidation relief, doubt and any other feeling as well as any actor."

But as we see through the character of the landlord’s son, not everyone can be a storyteller.

"He opened his mouth and waited, agog, to hear what emerged from it. Nothing did. His face screwed squirmed with laughter and his shoulders squirmed in hilarity at himself."

This is a novel that shows what great storytelling is all about. And why we never tire of hearing a good tale.

A magical tale with myriad wonderful characters - so spellbinding and mysterious that it really sucked me in to the story. Setterfield really is an amazing storyteller and the individual tales are woven together with such skill.

What an enthralling read! Based around the river Thames in mid 19th century England, an injured man holding a child (which appears lifeless) turns up on the doorstep of a pub. The child lives but the identity of it is unknown. Therein lies a plethora of twists, turns as 2 families have lost a child...to which of these families does it belong? Dragons, witchcraft, kidnappings, family dramas and much local gossip ('once upon a river') keep the reader guessing where the truth lies. A gripping read, highly recommended.

Beautifully written and a totally captivating story - I was swept up in the village from the first page to the last. Will definitely be reading more by Diane Setterfield - this is one of my books of the year so far!

It took me a little while to get into this book but I'm so glad I persevered. It is a beautifully written novel that combines historical fiction with a hint of magical realism to create something captivating, spellbinding and a little strange. The characters were all incredibly well drawn, and the mystery at the heart of the narrative really drew me in.

DNF -

This book has an interesting premise and sets up the location and genre really well, but ultimately was a complete slog to get through. I felt as if I was wading through something and desperately trying to grab onto the key parts of the story. I did not end up finishing it because I just couldn't handle it. I would have really liked to see this book written slightly more concisely, with less jumping between characters and more emphasis on certain moments. It needed more peaks and troughs, rather than the same note running through. Obviously there were some interesting happenings, but I didn't feel very affected by them due to the lack of emphasis on those certain parts.

There are several reviews mentioning that getting through the first half is the hardest part, and that the ending is worth it. I was unable to get that far but I hope everyone else enjoyed it! I am usually a fan of Gothic-folklore type stories, but this one was definitely not for me.

I read an extract of this book months ago and have been desperate to read the whole book since then. It’s fair to say I fell in love with the book after reading just a few pages. I was delighted when I was approved for the book on NetGalley. I was not disappointed. This is one of the most original books I’ve read in ages and it blends folklore, myth and a bit of Dickens. I loved the way the book builds us myth, suspense and intrigue. The book opens in dramatic fashion with a seemingly drowned girl possibly coming back to life. Most of the book focuses on discovering her identity to try and find out which of three local families can claim the girl as one of them. The truth is carefully, gradually revealed and the author really knows how to tell a story. The River Thames plays a big role in the book which is unusual but works really well.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, one of the best I've read for a while. Having read and loved The Thirteenth Tale, I knew I'd be in for a good solid story with Once Upon A River. Several times during the book I was reminded of the writing style of Charles Dickens – a story with proper grounding and characters with personality.

Set in 1887 on the banks of the River Thames, much of the story centres around the The Swan, a local inn where storytelling is the entertainment and where more beer means more embellishment. One evening, an injured man stumbles in carrying a young girl who appears to be dead. A little girl who sometime later is alive. This is a time when superstition and supernatural blurred into real life and a dead girl coming back to life is a fantastical story for all to tell and re-tell.

The girl has three possible identities, she is either Alice, Amelia or Ann, and none is certain of her identity even when she lives with two of the families claiming her. The girl herself has lost the ability to speak and there is frustration from the Vaughan's who desperately want her to be Amelia, their daughter who disappeared two years ago.

The river plays a large part of the story and to add to the strange goings on with a child coming back to life, there is rain, more rain, and inevitable flooding which seeps into their homes and lives as the river becomes a torrent.

Amidst superstition and folklore there's also skulduggery, ransoms and beatings. Once Upon A River is a fulfilling story which has a depth of storytelling which is rare these days. I absolutely loved it.

<i>"One day the river helpfully runs a wheel to grind your barley, the next it drowns your crop."</i>
This quote sums up the essence of this novel. Based on an imaginary version of the River Thames in Victorian times, we follow a story of a girl who seemingly drowns, but is actually alive. Who is she? Where has she been? Why is everyone so drawn to this girl?
Magical realism meets historical fiction in this strangely captivating story. Like the river, it can be slow moving and meander down different paths, but it has a mesmerizing feel to it. So many interesting characters with their own stories to tell while we slowly try and discover the answer to the mystery of this drowned girl.

Recommended to fans of magical realism who don't mind a slow pace and intriguing story.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

I would have loved to read and review this but inadvertently left it too late and now find it's been archived. Whoops. Sorry. I really enjoyed the 13th Tale though! Star rating based on that since I can't comment without one.

What a lovely book and story this is, I was pleasantly surprised to be honest and I really did enjoy it....it was beautifully written and had me lost in it very easily, it was quite haunting in parts and I found it unique with the way it was told and written, kind of mystery slash fairytale and I was hooked.

Little gem of a book.

LOVE Diane Setterfield and will read anything she writes, but this is another special book from her. The minute you start reading you know you're in good hands and the story is engaging and intriguing, weird and wonderful from the beginning.

I thoroughly enjoyed this wonderful piece of story-telling. The author takes multiple threads of location and character and weaves a magical tapestry that draws you in and keeps your attention throughout. Simply delightful.

This stunning book absolutely captivated me from the first chapter. Darkly gothic, mystical and mysterious, it drew in all the strands of the story like tributaries joining the River Thames which formed the character around which all the character's lives revolved. Beautifully evocative, atmospheric and heart-rending, this book drew me in to an alternative world as all the best stories do. I fell in love with the characters of Bess and Robert Armstrong, Rita, and Mr Daunt. The villains in the tale in the form of Mr Nash and Robin were grotesque and cruel and showed the dark side of humanity, with no punches pulled. My favourite part of the book was the scene between Robert and Bess, when she removed her eye patch, which by contrast, showed the absolute best side of humanity. I cannot recommend this book enough, read it and you will be transported.

One of my best reads of this year. I utterly loved this book and I think Diane Setterfield is a great writer. She has created a compelling original story using some archetypal storytelling techniques. Highly recommended.

Once Upon A River by Diane Setterfield

I know this book has been out for a few months now but I’m so behind on my NetGalley reads that I’ve only just managed to get around to this one.

Ok so having read The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfields and having really enjoyed it I was really looking forward to reading this one.

The opening chapters were so exciting and thrilling, but then everything started to get confusing with the backstories and ended up having to re-read sections to get my head around to what was happening. This is turn slowed down me down and at times I was ready to give up on the book altogether. But, I’m so glad I didn’t as by the end I really got into it and it all came together nicely and finally all made sense.

This book is elegantly written and has some beautiful descriptions but I personally thought it was a little too long and a bit long winded in some places. Also, there are quite a lot of characters in this book and I couldn’t quite remember who was who and felt I had to concentrate quite a bit while reading about them. But having said that I found them all very interesting. I found them to be unique and I liked how Setterfield cleverly made them seem like they were all intertwined with each other.


Overall a slow burner of a read that I did eventually finished after a week of struggle. But in the end a book I did enjoy, just not as much as The Thirteenth Tale. However, a book I would recommend.

I would like to thank NetGalley and the publisher’s Random House UK, Transworld Publishers, Doubleday for a copy of my eARC in return for an honest and unbiased review.

Writing as an art form.
Diane Setterfield has such an amazing way with words, I enjoyed every page of this book and, interspersed with audiobooks and other reads, I managed to make it last for several weeks. Sadly, I have finally finished, but I've promised myself to listen to the audiobook in a few months, something I never do.

At the centre of the narrative is the River Thames, never far from the action and winding continuously in the background. Living alongside the river is a curious assortment of folk, rich and poor, good and bad. And into this community appears a little girl, apparently dead, but then miraculously alive again. No one knows who she is, everyone is immediately drawn to her and several people claim her to be theirs.

The way this story unravels, drip feeding facts and background, is a work of art. I highlighted a large number of quotes on my Kindle, so as to remember their beauty. I will share just two:

A character finds himself drowning: "He groped for the surface; his hands met trailing, floating plants. He grasped to haul himself up, but his fingers closed on gravel and mud. Flailing – twisting – the surface! – gone again. He took in more water than air, and when he cried for help – though who had ever helped him, was he not the most betrayed of men? – when he cried for help, there were only the lips of the river pressed to his, and her fingers pinched his nostrils shut." (loc 6985),

During a flood: "He thought of the fish that strayed without knowing it from the main current and now found themselves swimming through grass a few inches above the ground, sharing territory with him and with his horse. He hoped Fleet would not tread on any creature lost in this landscape that no longer belonged clearly to earth or water. He hoped they would all be well." (Loc 7231)

Her first novel, The Thirteenth Tale, is one of my all-time favourite books, with Bellman and Black close behind. My only regret is that Diane Setterfield doesn't publish books more often.

Don't miss this one.

A beautifully written, fantastical tale about a little girl who emerges from a river and floods the lives of all who encounter her with self-awareness, hope and magic. The story flows so beautifully and the characters are portrayed in such a human way that it is easy to get swept up. I couldn’t put this book down and as soon as I finished it, I wanted to read it again. This author is a rare storyteller and this book is a gem.

“A river no more begins at its source than a story begins with the first page.” So begins this tale set along the Thames River and its tributaries, starting at the Swan inn at Radcot, famous for its storytelling. It’s solstice night, the longest night of the year, “a time of magic. And as the borders between night and day stretch to their thinnest, so too do the borders between worlds. Dreams and stories merge with lived experience, the dead and the living brush against each other in their comings and goings, the past and the present touch and overlap. Unexpected things can happen.” A stranger stumbles into the inn, carrying a little girl who, for all intents and purposes, is dead. “A body always tells a story – but this child’s corpse was a blank page.” Then she shows signs of life. “Is it a miracle?” It is “as if they had told a tale of a fairy princess and finished it only to find her sitting in a corner of the room listening.”

The girl is later claimed by no less than three different families:

Bess and Robert Armstrong, farmers from Kelmscott, believe she is their grandchild Alice, the daughter of their son Robin.

At Buscot, Helena and Anthony Vaughan mourn the disappearance of her daughter Amelia two years earlier. Can this be her?

And Lily White, the parson’s housekeeper, claims the child is her sister Ann, who died many years ago. How can this be so?

But they’re not the only ones who want her. Innkeeper Margot, who already has thirteen children, wants to keep her. Henry Daunt, the photographer who rescues the girl, feels she is the daughter he wishes he’d had from his failed marriage. Even Rita Sunday, the nurse who never wanted to have a child, wishes she were hers. And then there’s Mr. Quietly, the ghostly ferryman whose daughter drowned in the river. The girl herself does not speak and seems perfectly content with whoever takes her. But she has an endless fascination with the river. Who is she really?

The narrator speaks to us directly, involving us in the narrative:

“That photograph, do you remember?”

“And now, dear reader, the story is over.”

The main story detours into rich backstories which we think are irrelevant but which all tie together masterfully. We are introduced to an array of characters whose stories are woven into the original narrative via the river, as these scenes take place along tributaries of the Thames. The ever-present river is anthropomorphized and becomes a character in its own right:

“The water, bright and cold and fast-running, hissed as it passed. At irregular intervals it spat …”

“… in the background, the breath of the river, an endless exhalation.”

“… she gazed into the darkness and listened to the sound of the river as it rushed by.”

The book contains great descriptive passages:

“By night (and this story begins at night) the bridge was drowned black, and it was only when your ears noticed the low and borderless sound of great quantities of moving water that you could make out the stretch of liquid blackness that flowed outside the window, shifting and undulating, darkly illuminated by some energy of its own making.”

“Outside, the cold sliced through her coat without resistance and sharpened its blade against her skin, but she scarcely noticed.”

The author’s simple, yet powerful prose allows us to see things in a whole new light:

“Rita Sunday was not afraid of corpses. She was used to them from childhood, had even been born from one.”

“Drowning is easy. Every year the river helps herself to a few lives.”

“They were collectors of words, […] They kept an ear constantly alert for them, the rare, the unusual, the unique.”

“She walked through the warm steam of her own exhalation, felt it lay itself as wetness on her face.”

“His head was alive with ideas and he walked rapidly to deposit them with the person who would surely want to know all about it.”

“When they had married, Robin was already on the way, put into her womb by another man.”

“… his words reached their target and hurt as his fists could never have done …”

She uses imaginative similes; for example, describing how stories change in the re-telling: “It was like a living thing that he had caught but not trained; now it had slipped the leash and was anybody’s.”

And watery metaphors:

“It had seemed then that her daughter’s absence had flooded Helena, flooded them both, and that with their words they were trying to bail themselves out. But the words were eggcups and what they were describing was an ocean of absence, too vast to be contained in such modest vessels.”

“The throng thickened to stagnation and he was obliged to stop altogether, then he found a sluggish current and inched forward again.”

And her description of the river’s path to the ocean, including a poetic description of the water cycle, is pure genius:

“… the river water clings to the leaves of the willows that droop to touch its surface, and then when the sun comes up a droplet appears to vanish into the air, where it travels invisibly and might join a cloud, a vast floating lake, until it falls again as rain. This is the unmappable journey of the Thames.”

Just like the storytellers at the Swan, the author’s storytelling is so engaging that I didn’t want to put the book down, and I didn’t want it to end. The author’s first book, The Thirteenth Tale, is one of my favorite books of all time. I’m so glad this one didn’t disappoint.

Warnings: mild sex scene, suicide, violence.