Pearl by Siân Hughes

In a tale entwined with the Middle English poems Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a woman looks back at a period in her life soon after she lost her mother, who is believed to have walked into the water of a river, and comes to realise that she likely didn't do so because she was sad. Everything, she later realises, indicated that her mother intended to return that day but that the river, known to be treacherous, had swallowed her up as she went to visit a child who had died, a child of hers whom she didn't want to leave behind or forget.