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The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (Paperback)
M. John Harrison (author)Published: 15/04/2021
From one of the fathers of modern science fiction comes a beguiling and disquieting vision of a waterlogged post-Brexit Britain fuelled by wild conspiracy theories and ever more mysterious occurrences.
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2020
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.
Publisher: Orion Publishing Co
ISBN: 9780575096363
Number of pages: 272
Weight: 240 g
Dimensions: 196 x 128 x 26 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
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
Unsettling, 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
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“An exquisite book about fish people and England”
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is a strange and wonderful read. I hadn't read anything from the author before (in fact, I'd never heard of him either) and wouldn't have read the book without... More
“Gloriously weird”
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is another 2020 book that I put aside till less hectic times and eventually read over Christmas. It was a glorious read for me, but I have to say I find my reviewing skills rather... More
“A deeply strange and wonderful exploration of the vagaries of human interaction”
From his unlovely and lonely bedsit Shaw lives a life of dislocation and vague disinterest. His life is stalled and he has little interest in restarting it. A chance meeting in a graveyard nets him a new job... More
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