Groundwater

Complex and chilling ... A finely drawn portrait not only of a couple in crisis, but of a world on the verge of disaster. Though anchored in the ordinary, this nimble-footed novel wrestles with the “desperate and self-serving need to enshrine the self” — work, having children, even the creation of art — in the face of catastrophe. McMullan writes with a masterful naturalism

FINANCIAL TIMES

McMullan’s shape-shifting novel is a masterclass in apprehension, exposing the fissures between an imagined life and its reality with stealthy power, and boldly upending reader expectations. Richly unsettling

DAILY MAIL

It is Thomas McMullan’s ability to cultivate this feeling - that all speech is somehow arbitrary, that all outcomes are somehow just a die’s role away - that gives this disquieting, suspenseful novel its strength ... What animates the novel is a series of tensions: between material stability and emotional turmoil; idealism and conformity; speech and silence; love in the abstract and love in practice; between a life and the life. McMullan handles these tensions deftly

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Beautiful, poetic, a cut above ... Moves between languid and downright creepy

SHORTLIST

As uncanny and fretful as a nightmare, Groundwater is nonetheless rooted in a totally real place and is populated with a cast of completely convincing characters. The Hell which is other people is meticulously painted here with humour, imagination and genuine poignancy

AIDAN COTTRELL BOYCE

McMullan is a skilled cartographer of interior worlds, tracing the unspoken thoughts and feelings that lie beneath the surface

BUZZ MAGAZINE

Groundwater is an exquisite study of characters bound together by domestic life, compelled by both intimacy and discord, as their interactions gradually expose a deeply rooted desire for the feral

CHRISTIANA SPENS

Uncanny and unsettling, Groundwater is a masterful portrait of the fractious, shimmering webs underneath our not-so ordinary lives. Throughout the novel menace and beauty knock up against each other, both revealing just how much there is at stake

SOPHIE MACKINTOSH

So dreamlike and yet so tense – a heady combination beautifully balanced by McMullan. This is a novel that gets right under your skin

ELLA FREARS

Groundwater subtly plucks at the invisible strings that connect one person to another - the familial, the romantic, those of friendship, of dependency. It explores the gulf that can form between ourselves and the ones we love, how we can make sense of it, how we can cross it.

VANESSA ONWUEMEZI

Praise for The Last Good Man: A Scarlet Letter for our times

MARGARET ATWOOD

Recalling the smack-in-the-face technique of early Ian McEwan … Viciously captivating: frightening to be around, impossible to put aside

GUARDIAN

A visceral and disquieting debut novel about the power of words

NEW STATESMAN

McMullan makes highly effective use of the rugged landscape, full of unease and portents, in his creepily unsettling debut, a timely tale about the dangers of toxic rhetoric and mob rule

DAILY MAIL

A brilliantly unsettling parable about how we police our societies through violence, language and shame

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