The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

By: M. John Harrison

Narrated by: Max Dowler

*WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2020*

*A New Statesman Book of the Year*

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.

©2020 M. John Harrison (P)2020 Orion Publishing Group

Critic reviews

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

'Brilliantly unsettling' Olivia Laing 'A magificent book.' Neil Gaiman

'An extraordinary experience' William Gibson

dull never really gets going

Lots of potential but it never really gets going. The characters are difficult to care about. They live boring lives with the pretense of the plot line to act as the hook. But since the plot doesnt develop this fails.

Rambling, nonsensical, boring drivel. Returned!

I don't usually listen to audiobooks under 10hrs long but gave this one a try. It felt like I had surpassed 10 hours after an hour of listening.
At first I thought that since the book was read with an English accent and that it was written with incessant references that only someone from the UK would understand, that I, (being American), would just have to get used to the way it was written to enjoy the story.

Then at some point I realized that the author was just rambling. It was like listening to the internal dialog of an old man as he wanders around England and is describing to himself every nuance of every unimportant thing he happens by.

Every single pointless detail is described for everything. You assume, at first, that since things are being described so thoroughly that this information would become important later in the story. Nope.

I almost feel like the author was having one over on us. As if he was sitting around the local pub (which he goes on in detail to describe many in the "story") and joked with his chaps about how he could write 250 pages of ridiculous, and random mutterings and people would buy it and behest favor on it...

So many sentences were nonsensical, and not in the clever, fun nonsensical way of Alice in Wonderland,... more like nonsensical like an advanced Alzheimer patient.
There was: no point, no plot, no fun, no excitement, no protagonist, no antagonist, no story.
Anyone who pretended to enjoy this book is a literary snob and a liar.
DO NOT waste a credit on this bad pub joke.