The Inland Sea

(Paperback)

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Description

As she faces the open wilderness of adulthood, our young narrator finds that the world around her is coming undone. She works part-time as an emergency dispatch operator, tracking the fires and floods that rage across Australia during an increasingly unstable year. Drinking heavily, sleeping with strangers, she finds herself wandering Sydney's streets late at night as she navigates a troubled affair with an ex-lover. Reckless and adrift, she begins to contemplate leaving.

Writing with down-to-earth lucidity and ethereal breeziness, Watts builds to a tightly controlled bushfire of ecological and personal crisis. This is an unforgettable debut about coming of age in a dying world.

'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

Reviews

'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

Author Bio

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.