Groundwater

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Groundwater by Thomas McMullan, read by Emily Pennant-Rea and Elliot Chapman.

By the winner of the Betty Trask Prize – an atmospheric and powerfully menacing story about family, secrets and violence

‘Groundwater masterfully and subtly begins to re-enchant all that we have reduced’ Amber Husain
'A masterful portrait of the fractious, shimmering webs underneath our not-so ordinary lives' Sophie Mackintosh
'This is a novel that gets right under your skin' Ella Frears


John and Liz have left the city behind to move to a remote house on the shores of the lake. Though the house is barely unpacked, Liz’s sister, with her children and her husband, have come to visit for the August bank holiday weekend.

Over the course of a hot, slow weekend, tensions simmer; things go unsaid – between the two couples, between the two sisters. Their time together is punctured by visits from Jim, the solitary local warden for the area; and a group of students camping nearby draw closer and closer, finally infiltrating the house – and bringing their own tensions and hierarchies with them.

As the weekend draws to a close, the landscape reveals a violence that has long lain hidden – and the summer builds to its harrowing climax.

Taut and menacing, full of disquiet and tenderness, Groundwater is about the gulfs that lies between us and those we love – and the miraculous ways our deepest desires and fears manifest.

Critics Review

A ruthless and minutely observed reckoning with the stories, beliefs, and places we make to shelter from fear of death
AMBER HUSAIN
McMullan is attuned to tone, texture, even breath ... Tender and dreamlike ... Digs into emotional fault lines and lays bare simmering tensions
LITERARY REVIEW
Unsettling and seductive ... A disquieting study in estrantement, mortality and the fragile membranes between past and present, surface and depth. Groundwater invites us to recognise that we too live atop hidden depths, where the parasocial and environmental, the self and the wild, are bound in ways we barely understand
IRISH TIMES
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
INDEPENDENT.CO.UK

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