The Inland Sea

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 * 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 * Watts captures the urgency of life right now, the particular blend of desire and destructiveness that comes with feeling like there is no longer a guarantee of tomorrow. And while The Inland Sea might not do much to ease the anxiety of these times, reading and getting lost in the shimmering sentences does feel a little like finding a small and perfect oasis in the midst of all the fires that burn around us * Refinery 29 * 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 * 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 * he 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 * The Inland Sea is notable for how delicately it explores how a global crisis can intersect and amplify a personal one . . . Watts has written a surprisingly dreamy new standout in the climate-fiction canon. * Wired * In this wonderful first novel, a young woman endures a 'splendid conflagration of emergency' in the midst of a boiling Australian summer... The novel revolves around catastrophes of various scales, personal and global but also historical * The Millions * A dizzying account of anxiety * Elle * Watts writes with unquestionable poise and intelligence * Wall Street Journal * Madeleine Watts might become to Australia what Joan Didion is to California? * Read Like the Wind (Vulture's newsletter) * Watts expertly weaves two stories, told centuries apart, to reveal how our anxieties about our place in the world and the safety and future of the world have remained unchanged * Debutiful * Introspective with a febrile realism that borders on the surreal, Madeleine Watts's The Inland Sea is as evocative and haunting as works by Samantha Hunt or Ottessa Moshfegh * Shelf Awareness * The Inland Sea is a slow burn of a self-destructive woman struggling to make it through * Alma, Favourite Books for Winter * This is a coming-of-age novel fit for the crippling uncertainty of twenty-first-century young adulthood . . . The powerful metaphors, relatable negotiation for a satisfying livelihood, and ethereal setting make Watts' debut a can't-miss * Booklist * An unnamed protagonist watches Australia burn as her body burns along with it . . . People around her experience disasters, and she keeps herself outside. She goes through trauma, and she doesn't know she's the one screaming. Magnificently uncomfortable * Kirkus Reviews * Australian writer Watts punctuates her eloquent debut with deep-seated anxiety about climate change . . . The prose is consistently rich and loaded with imagery. Watts's bold, unconventional outing makes for a distinctive entry into climate fiction * Publisher's Weekly * Strikingly original and confident work... sensitive and complex * The London Magazine * An assured and complex dive into the Australian female coming-of-age novel * ABC * The Inland Sea joins recent efforts like Richard Powers's The Overstory and Jenny Offill's Weather-two novels that have bent the genre norms of realism to ecocritical ends... The large crises of the novel are shot through with smaller pains-indignities and heartbreak and badly inserted IUDs that serve as micro indices for other kinds of harm... In carefully lining up climatological events and the banalities of breakups, The Inland Sea suggests that climate crisis may very well be representable within the generic containment of everyday life. * Los Angeles Review of Books * An eyecatcher in both premise and language, which is rough-and-tough, visceral, and absorbing * Library Journal * Painfully beautiful, immersive, yet at its core a novel about a person's love of place, of home, family, and about how this home, mental and physical, has fallen into danger. Gripping -- Weike Wang, author of CHEMISTRY It feels reductive to call this novel 'climate fiction' because it so powerfully embeds climate catastrophe within a network of other crises: gender relations, colonialism, human cruelty. Inland Sea is beautiful, bleak, and relentless * ExBerliner *