The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

By M. John Harrison

Book Overview

*WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2020*

*A New Statesman Book of the Year*

'A mesmerising, mysterious book . . . Haunting. Worrying. Beautiful' Russell T. Davis

'Brilliantly unsettling' Olivia Laing

'A magificent book' Neil Gaiman

'An extraordinary experience' William Gibson

Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2020, this is fiction that pushes the boundaries of the novel form.

Shaw had a breakdown, but he's getting himself back together. He has a single room, a job on a decaying London barge, and an on-off affair with a doctor's daughter called Victoria, who claims to have seen her first corpse at age thirteen.

It's not ideal, but it's a life. Or it would be if Shaw hadn't got himself involved in a conspiracy theory that, on dark nights by the river, seems less and less theoretical...

Meanwhile, Victoria is up in the Midlands, renovating her dead mother's house, trying to make new friends. But what, exactly, happened to her mother? Why has the local waitress disappeared into a shallow pool in a field behind the house? And why is the town so obsessed with that old Victorian morality tale, The Water Babies?

As Shaw and Victoria struggle to maintain their relationship, the sunken lands are rising up again, unnoticed in the shadows around them.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0575096365
• ISBN13: 9780575096363
• Release Date: April 2021
• Publisher: Gollancz
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.1" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

I just didn't get it.

Maybe it was me, but I just didn't get it. I kept waiting for something to happen/be revealed. It left me unsatisfied. Characters were interesting. Both of the main characters' personalities were totally different than mine, so I enjoyed reading their thought processes. Description of landscape/places was nice but too many towns, roads, buildings, taverns, rivers, etc. Being American, I probably didn't understand some of the humor.