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Long Wave

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What to expect

A hypnotic and haunting story of longing and survival, losing yourself and finding your family

Close to the shore is the island: uninhabited, wild, with only a storm-beaten lighthouse for shelter. Ori was found there as a small child with a handful of stones, no memories and no mother. When she has a baby of her own, the job of motherhood feels immense and sleepless nights begin to shatter her grip on reality. Her head fills with the sound of stones knocking against each other and the mystery of her past begins to unravel, opening up a path to the mother she lost, and the mother she could become.

Years earlier, on a sweltering summer day, ten-year-old Ruth sees a woman and her baby walk into the river and disappear. But she is the only witness, and the water yields no trace. Ruth’s mother, Edith, locks her daughter away – first to restrain these wild imaginings, and later, when she falls pregnant, to hide the shame. Ruth longs to escape and dreams of the nearby island, where she and her baby can finally be free.

'Daisy Johnson's best novel... a multi-generational story of secrets, obsessions, and love' Jeff VanderMeer

'Astonishingly beautiful' Kaliane Bradley

'An unflinchingly observed treatise on the maelstrom of motherhood. Masterful' Kiran Millwood Hargrave

'A fierce and magical writer' Liz Berry

'At once devastating and heartening' Helen Phillips

© Daisy Johnson 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Critics Review

Long Wave, Daisy Johnson's best novel in an already spectacular career, uncovers heart-rending truths in a multi-generational story of secrets, obsessions, and love. Hopeful, tragic, beautiful, captivating, consuming. A remarkable achievement — such depth, but also what a page-turner!
Jeff VanderMeer
An astonishingly beautiful novel with an unearthly sirenic power that remains grounded in the knotty, ambivalent and profound relationships between its characters – mothers, daughters, lovers, the lost. Long Wave is a triumph
Kaliane Bradley
The power of Johnson's storytelling is elemental, fundamental, irresistible. Long Wave has the gravity of an epic and is her greatest achievement yet: a gripping mystery, a series of impeccable character portraits, and an unflinchingly observed treatise on the maelstrom of motherhood. Masterful
Kiran Millwood Hargrave
Johnson writes of motherhood as a ferocious toppling, family as lightning that brachiates and crackles through a life. This is a novel of startling force. Readers will feel Long Wave in their teeth and bones
C Pam Zhang
An extraordinary, masterful, magnificent book. Daisy Johnson has been away, plumbing the river's depths, and brought us back something magical. I read it in a kind of trance, profoundly moved, held aloft by its strange currents. It took me places I never expected; the best novel I've read all year.
Helen Jukes
I was gripped by this haunting story of mothers and children pushed right to the edges. Daisy Johnson’s world feels painfully real, and yet bristles with magic
Becky Barnicoat
In Long Wave, Daisy Johnson explores caregiving and failures of caregiving. Looping through many years and many lives, this book is at once quiet and intense, at once devastating and heartening. I was carried by Johnson’s potent prose, and I was moved by these intersecting perspectives
Helen Phillips
Daisy Johnson is a fierce and magical writer and I love her books. In Long Wave she directs her electric attention to early motherhood, its fevers and anguish, and how dreaming is passed between generations of women. I am, as always, in awe of her
Liz Berry
A reader who is willing to sit with the uncertainty will be richly rewarded...Johnson’s command of language is simply stunning...what a joy it is to read a writer who so confidently prioritises character and language above gimmick or twist... a work that will endure with readers long after they have closed its pages.
Guardian
The psychological disruptions of childhood that unfold in a semi-mythical English pastoral setting belong to an expanding oeuvre that includes novels by Sarah Moss and Max Porter. Long Wave is suffused with the same eeriness. Atmosphere is everything here: a strangely fused sorrow and mysticism… its unsettling elusiveness… [is] part of its weird power
Financial Times
Author Daisy Johnson
Narrator Kristin Atherton, Joe Jameson
Duration 7 hours and 14 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781529904499
Format Audiobook
Publisher Random House
Genre Family life fiction, Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Identity / belonging, Narrative theme: Interior life
Availability AU, GB, IE

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