The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, M. John Harrison
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, M. John Harrison
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
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The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2020

Author: M. John Harrison

Narrator: Max Dowler

Unabridged: 8 hr 15 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Gollancz

Published: 06/25/2020


Synopsis

*WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2020*

*A New Statesman Book of the Year*

'A mesmerising, mysterious book . . . Haunting. Worrying. Beautiful' Russell T. Davis

'Brilliantly unsettling' Olivia Laing

'A magificent book' Neil Gaiman

'An extraordinary experience' William Gibson

Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2020, this is fiction that pushes the boundaries of the novel form.

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.

About M. John Harrison

M. John Harrison (1945 - ) Michael John Harrison is the author of, amongst others, the Viriconium stories, The Centauri Device, Climbers, The Course of the Heart, Signs of Life, Light and Nova Swing. He has won the Boardman Tasker Award (Climbers), the James Tiptree Jr Award (Light) and the Arthur C. Clarke Award (Nova Swing). He lives in Shropshire.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer on December 21, 2021

Now winner of the 2020 Goldsmith Prize. I have proposed in the past that given its rather obvious lack of diversity the prize should be renamed the Celtic Prize. So how appropriate to have a “state of the nation” book where the only characters not white are green. Essex Serpent (by Sarah Perry), Riv......more

Goodreads review by Jayaprakash on July 19, 2020

OMFG this book. So there's a man, emerging from a kind of loss of self, still only halfway out. There's a woman retreating to a safe place, but it turns out to be something else. There is a conspiracy community, or several. Anxiety: selfhood, brexit, climate change. There is transformation and renewa......more

Goodreads review by Paul on January 07, 2022

"As I said, in July..."Recommended - and one that would make a good Goldsmith's contender" - now winner of the Prize!! Is logic in any sense the right method to be applying here? Two years ago I had the pleasure of reading a range of innovative fiction from UK/Irish small independent presses as part o......more

Goodreads review by Darko on July 17, 2020

Intelligent and eerie, masterfully crafted and inconspicuously relevant, the new M. John Harrison novel draws a lot from his previous work – from "Climbers" to his recent flash fiction, via "The Course of the Heart", "Signs of Life" and even the Kefahuchi Tract novels – subliming the already seen an......more

Goodreads review by Héctor on May 17, 2022

Un libro strano. Non è tanto la trama – per quanto ricca – il centro del racconto, quanto l'atmosfera che Harrison sa creare, un clima di attesa, straniamento, confusione. Come confusi sono i due protagonisti, persone che arrivate alla mezza età realizzano di non aver costruito nulla e ora non sann......more


Quotes

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. 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