I'm glad you liked the Samatar piece. She's a really thoughtful writer, and — I'm not quite sure how to describe this — her writing has a slow, deliberate quality, in the sense that she respects her readers' intelligence, and trusts them to read what she's saying slowly, to give her words the time they need to be understood.

I hope you get to read The River Has Roots soon, and enjoy it (based on what you've said, I think you will). The body of water in this case is a river, rather than the sea, though.

It really is sad to see how often this happens, and how it's somehow never predictable in the midst of it.

I still remember when Avicii died, and how incredibly young he was, having already achieved a level of financial success and stardom that many musicians will only dream of. Watching the documentary with the knowledge of hindsight, the signs seem blazingly there for all to see: viewers witness his physical transformation from a fairly normal looking soft-faced, gawky teenage boy to a gaunt young man with a ravaged face, whose clothes hang off his body. All this in the space of a few years. It feels impossible, looking at that, for people not to have known, and acted — and yet of course they didn't.