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

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

‘Complex and chilling’ FINANCIAL TIMES
‘Masterful – uncanny and unsettling’ SOPHIE MACKINTOSH
‘A disquieting study in estrangement’ IRISH TIMES

John and Liz have left the city to move to a remote house on the shores of a lake. But along with the boxes, they have brought their trouble with them. They find the new house already haunted – by their old disappointments and longing.

Though the house is barely unpacked, Liz’s sister, with her children and husband, have come to visit. Over the course of a hot, slow week, tensions simmer; things go unsaid. And as outsiders descend on the house the atmosphere grows claustrophobic, the pressure near unbearable.

As summer draws to a close, and their family is thrown into crisis, John and Liz must confront what it means to belong to a place – and to each other.

'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’ TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

‘A finely drawn portrait not only of a couple in crisis, but of a world on the verge of disaster … McMullan writes with a masterful naturalism’ FINANCIAL TIMES

'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

"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

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

"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