The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2020
Published on 25. June 2020
Book
Hardback
272 pages
978-0-575-09635-6 (ISBN)
Description
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 fourteen.
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.
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 fourteen.
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.
Reviews / Votes
Unsettling and insinuating, fabulously alert to the spaces between things, Harrison is without peer as a chronicler of the fraught, unsteady state we're in. * The Guardian * Like reading Thomas Pynchon underwater, this is a book of alienation, atmosphere, half glimpsed revelation - and some of the most beautiful writing you'll ever encounter. * Daily Mail * One of the strangest and most unsettling novels of the year * The Herald * Harrison is a linguistic artist, constructing sentences that wrap and weave like a stream of consciousness without ever breaking focus...every sentence is a decadent bite of a new sensation * Sci Fi Now * Uncanny and exquisite * Morning Star * The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is a novel so good all the usual reviewerish superlatives barely seem superlative enough. -- Adam Roberts * Sibilant Fricative * Harrison's unsettling and melancholy novel, gritted with farce and dreadful laughter, shouts award-winner on every page. * The Times * Richly textured...slippery and seedy. * The Spectator * A deeply unsettling fever dream of a novel. 4.5 out of 5. * SFX * [There is] beauty and precision of [Harrison's] psychogeographic prose. 9.4/10. * Fantasy Book Review * Masterful and deeply affecting. * Locus Magazine * This excellent book may be the most unsettling piece of fiction you read this year... * Shiny New Books * Harrison is a linguistic artist, constructing sentences that wrap and weave like a stream of consciousness without ever breaking focus. * Sci-Fi Paradise * Unset-tling, brilliant, and pretty much unlike anything anyone else is doing. * Locus * Beautifully written, utterly compelling, and like much of Harrison's works, there are scenes of such sublime strangeness that they linger in the mind long after the novel is over. As such it is another triumph from one of our finest writers, and essential reading for 2020 * Fantasy Hive * One of the best writers of fiction currently at work in English * Robert MacFarlane * A stunning masterpiece * Paul Cornell * Treads the line between realism and fantasy with immense assurance and draws a portrait of watery, post-Brexit Britain that brings shivers of both unease and recognition -- Jonathan Coe, author of international bestseller Middle England * New Statesman Books of the year * As ominous and bizarre as the title suggests. This funny, unsettling book is better left undescribed, but 'post-Brexit England haunted by green fish-people growing out of toilet bowls' should, uh, whet the appetite -- Rory Scothorne * New Statesman Books of the year * Slippery and dreamlike, a profoundly and eerily disquieting experience . . . future critics will find in his writing a distinct, clear-eyed vision of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century life * J.S. Barnes, Times Literary Supplement * Brilliantly unsettling * Olivia Laing * M. John Harrison's masterpiece * Frances Wilson, New Statesman * Absolutely astonishing * Michael Marshall Smith * A magnificent book * Neil Gaiman * An extraordinary experience * William Gibson * A mesmerising, mysterious book . . . Haunting. Worrying. Beautiful * Russell T. Davies *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Orion Publishing Co
Dimensions
Height: 236 mm
Width: 160 mm
Thickness: 30 mm
Weight
480 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-575-09635-6 (9780575096356)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
06/2020
1st Edition
Gollancz
€3.99
Available for download
Person
M. John Harrison (1945 - ) Michael John Harrison is the author of, amongst others, the Viriconium stories, The Centauri Device, Climbers, The Course of the Heart, Signs of Life, Light and Nova Swing. He has won the Boardman Tasker Award (Climbers), the James Tiptree Jr Award (Light) and the Arthur C. Clarke Award (Nova Swing). He lives in Shropshire.