This remarkable tale is a powerful reimagining of our species’ unfolding and its future potential. Rio Abajo Rio is many things at once - part post-creation myth, part evocation of the first words ever spoken, it is simultaneously a projection of a post-apocalyptic society. This brave book is not easily described because Barbara Fairhead’s narrative defies linearity in time and telling. The narration transports readers to a time and place when language was in formation and identity was fluid. Characters morph and shift with their emerging consciousness.