Slow River

Lore van de Oest is found naked in a wet street, cut and bleeding, by a woman who will not give her real name. The van de Oests are among the richest families in the world, their fortune built on bioremediation, on the microbes that clean the planet's water, and Lore has been kidnapped for ransom and has escaped, but she does not go home. Instead she takes up with Spanner, who deals in stolen identities and pornography and knows exactly how to make a runaway heiress useful. Griffith braids three strands together: the childhood in a family whose wealth has bought it the right never to be examined, the years with Spanner in a city's grey economy, and a later present in which Lore, calling herself Sal Bird and living on forged credentials, works shifts at a sewage treatment plant and discovers that the plant's records have been quietly falsified. The technical detail of water processing is exact and oddly beautiful. So is the book's central argument, made without a word of consolation: that identity is not something one recovers but something one builds, badly, out of whatever is to hand.