The Inland Sea
Published on 5. March 2020
Book
Hardback
256 pages
978-1-911590-23-1 (ISBN)
Description
In the early 19th century, British explorer John Oxley traversed the then-unknown wilderness of central Australia in search of water. Oxley never found it, but he never ceased to believe it was out there. The myth of the inland sea was taken up by other men, and over the years search parties walked out into the desert, dying as they tried to find it.
Two centuries later, his great-great-great-great granddaughter (and our narrator) spends a final year in Sydney reeling from her own self-destructive obsessions. She's working part-time as an emergency dispatch operator, drinking heavily, sleeping with strangers, wandering Sydney's streets late at night, and navigating an affair with an ex-lover. Reckless and adrift, she prepares to leave.
Written with down-to-earth lucidity and ethereal breeziness, this is an unforgettable debut about coming of age in a world that seems increasingly hostile. Watts explores feminine fear, apathy and danger, building to a tightly controlled bushfire of ecological and personal crisis.
Two centuries later, his great-great-great-great granddaughter (and our narrator) spends a final year in Sydney reeling from her own self-destructive obsessions. She's working part-time as an emergency dispatch operator, drinking heavily, sleeping with strangers, wandering Sydney's streets late at night, and navigating an affair with an ex-lover. Reckless and adrift, she prepares to leave.
Written with down-to-earth lucidity and ethereal breeziness, this is an unforgettable debut about coming of age in a world that seems increasingly hostile. Watts explores feminine fear, apathy and danger, building to a tightly controlled bushfire of ecological and personal crisis.
Reviews / Votes
Watts writes with precision and great power... To call The Inland Sea "a novel about climate change" would be to do it a disservice; it is about much else besides, capturing what it means to be young, wounded and afraid today better than anything else I've come across recently. It is a masterful debut that demands to be read * Telegraph * Full of heat and disquiet, astute and precise, almost savage in its eloquence, illuminating about what it feels like to love, to be left, to want more * Leslie Jamison, author of MAKE IT SCREAM, MAKE IT BURN * Fulfilling a need for fiction that deals with the climate crisis. I'm so glad this exists. Brilliant. * Olivia Sudjic * The Inland Sea is a tricky marvel: melancholy and bright, ingenious and gentle, an emergency inside of an idyll. Watts is an exceptional talent. * Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labours * Watts's prose crackles with electricity in the same way that the world she's writing about prickles with danger... In magnificently entwining the narrator's physical unravelling with that of the spiralling climate crisis, The Inland Sea feels both urgent and alive. It's a lush, original Bildungsroman for a terrifying new world -- Lucy Scholes * Financial Times * Watts' writing traverses both existential and touching-distance dreads of personal and eco crisis, with a luminous touch * Dazed * With great skill that is both meticulous in detail and vast in ambition, Watts constructs a claustrophobic, sweltering dome over her protagonist, one that captures contemporary anxieties around ideas of identity, femininity and the environment... It's both a warning and atonement for our future and our past * The Skinny * A sparking portrayal of dangerous thirst and unreachable interiors. -- Josephine Rowe, author of Here Until August A wise, captivating, and dreamlike tale full of longing, The Inland Sea is gentle and menacing as the ocean before a storm... Her incantatory prose belies the state of emergency that is our world. -- Jessi Jezewska Stevens, author of The Exhibition of Persephone Q Watts joins the ranks of authors such as the late Jade Sharma, Jen Beagin and Ottessa Moshfegh - brave female writers who mine their own lives and the lives of their characters to create searing, insightful debuts... captivating... The Inland Sea is at heart an inquiry into hostile climate and our slim chances of survival * Irish Times * Brilliant and breathtaking, The Inland Sea possesses the quality of the finest writing by seeming to have written itself. In pared-down yet fevered prose, the novel gives a precise glimpse into a world and a woman coming undone... I want everyone to read this provocative, perfect book. -- Jeannie Vanasco, author of The Glass Eye The writing is always lyrical and often powerful, the best parts of this book are the superbly evocative descriptions of Sydney and the near-visionary meditations on the destruction of the planet. * Sydney Morning Herald * Watts's prose crackles with heat and electricity and feels exactly like the kind of fiction we should be reading right now * Monocle, Book of the Month * The Inland Sea unfolds like a reverie, exploring human and ecological destructions on both an intimate and expansive scale * Culturefly * These new tales are not simply tracts telling us how to think or what actions to take but rather very human stories that help us to, at least, relate to the way in which the world is continuing to change * ipaper * Watts writes with precision and great power. She has an exceptional turn of phrase... like Sally Rooney, she forgoes quotation marks so that thought and dialogue run concurrently. The result is restrained, and supremely elegant. When she deals a death blow, Watts makes it effortless. To call the Inland Sea "a novel about climate change" would be to do it a disservice; it is about much else besides, capturing what it means to be young, wounded and afraid today better than anything else I've come across recently. It is a masterful debut that demands to be read * Daily Telegraph *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Pushkin Press
Product notice
Laminated cover
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 135 mm
Thickness: 14 mm
Weight
292 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-911590-23-1 (9781911590231)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Madeleine Watts grew up in Sydney, Australia and has lived in New York since 2013. She has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, and her fiction has been published in The White Review and The Lifted Brow. Her novella, Afraid of Waking It was awarded the 2015 Griffith Review Novella Prize. Her non-fiction has appeared in The Believer and the Los Angeles Review of Books. The Inland Sea is her first novel.