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

‘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.

"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