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Madeleine Watts - The Inland Sea (2nd Hand Paperback)
SKU B003137
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1 available
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Original price
£3.45
Original price
£3.45
£3.45
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£3.45
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Synopsis
Longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, 2021.
A fierce and beautiful debut novel about our capacity for harming ourselves, each other and the world around us.
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.
Details
- Format : Slightly Larger 2nd Hand Paperback
- Condition : Very Good (Almost As New)
- Category : Fiction - Modern Mainstream Fiction
- Published : 2020 (One)
- ISBN : 9781911590354
- SKU : B003137
- PPC : LL350gm
- RRP : £12.99
- Quantity Available : 1 only.
External Reviews
"A young woman drops out of college due to a fractious relationship, and becomes an anti-heroine. Working in a call-centre for emergency phone numbers in Sydney, she brings to us the increasing violence, random bad weather events and monstrous bushfires. All the while, she is well-advised but makes random, and wrong, decisions time and again, harming her body and destroying her future, as the powerful in Australian have been destroying their land. See this as women's fiction but also as allegory and a cheerless statement on the treatment of the environment." - Amazon Review.
"'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.
"'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' - The Telegraph.
"A tricky marvel; melancholy & bright, ingenious & gentle . . . Watts is an exceptional talent." - Rivka Galchen.
"Brilliant and breathtaking . . . " - Jeannie Vanasco, author of The Glass Eye.
The Author
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.