Published in the UK and Australia by Pushkin Press (March 2020) and in the US by Catapult (January 2021)
In the early nineteenth century, British explorer John Oxley traversed the unknown wilderness of central Australia in search of water - 'the inland sea'. He never found it, but he never ceased to believe that it was out there. Two centuries later, his great-great-great-great granddaughter spends her last year in Sydney reeling from her own self-destructive obsessions. She's working part-time as an emergency dispatch operator, drinking heavily, sleeping with strangers, wandering the city's dangerous streets late at night, and navigating an affair with an ex-lover. Reckless and adrift, she prepares to leave.
Written with down-to-earth lucidity and ethereal breeziness, The Inland Sea explores feminine fear, apathy, danger and longing, against a backdrop of ecological and personal crisis.
REVIEWS
Crackles with electricity in the same way that the world she's writing about prickles with danger... both urgent and alive. It s a lush, original Bildungsroman for a terrifying new world' — Lucy Scholes, Financial Times
‘Watts writes with precision and great power. She has an exceptional turn of phrase... restrained, and supremely elegant... To call The Inland Sea 'a novel about climate change' would be to do it a disservice; it is about much else besides, capturing what it means to be young, wounded and afraid today better than anything else I’ve come across recently. It is a masterful debut that demands to be read' — Telegraph (UK)
‘An unnamed protagonist watches Australia burn as her body burns along with it . . . People around her experience disasters, and she keeps herself outside. She goes through trauma, and she doesn’t know she’s the one screaming. Magnificently uncomfortable.’ — Kirkus Reviews
"Joins recent efforts like Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Jenny Offill’s Weather—two novels that have bent the genre norms of realism to ecocritical ends . . . The large crises of the novel are shot through with smaller pains—indignities and heartbreak and badly inserted IUDs that serve as micro indices for other kinds of harm . . . In carefully lining up climatological events and the banalities of breakups, The Inland Sea suggests that climate crisis may very well be representable within the generic containment of everyday life. First we just need to acknowledge that the anguish of an English tearoom and the anguish of geohistorical catastrophe might be happening simultaneously." — Molly MacVeagh, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Watts is not interested in going easy on us. She implores us to look, listen and start admitting what’s out there: emergencies will find us, even if we try our hardest to escape them. This book will resonate with readers who believe in best-case scenarios over reverse-engineering centuries of harm.” — The Saturday Paper
'Searing, insightful... captivating... at heart an inquiry into hostile climate and our slim chances of survival' — Irish Times
'These new tales are not simply tracts telling us how to think or what actions to take but rather very human stories that help us to, at least, relate to the way in which the world is continuing to change' -- i-paper'
Always lyrical and often powerful, the best parts of this book are the superbly evocative descriptions of Sydney and the near-visionary meditations on the destruction of the planet' — Sydney Morning Herald
"Australian writer Watts punctuates her eloquent debut with deep-seated anxiety about climate change . . . The prose is consistently rich and loaded with imagery. Watts’s bold, unconventional outing makes for a distinctive entry into climate fiction." — Publishers Weekly
"An eyecatcher in both premise and language, which is rough-and-tough, visceral, and absorbing." — Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
BLURBS
"Full of heart and disquiet, astute and precise, almost savage in its eloquence, illuminated about what it feels like to love, to be left, to want more." —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams
"A tricky marvel: melancholy and bright, ingenious and gentle, an emergency inside of an idyll. Watts is an exceptional talent." —Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors
"A sparking portrayal of dangerous thirst and unreachable interiors." —Josephine Rowe, author of Here Until August
"Painfully beautiful, immersive, yet at its core a novel about a person's love of place, of home, family, and about how this home, mental and physical, has fallen into danger. Gripping." —Weike Wang, author of Chemistry
"The Inland Sea is completely absorbing and sometimes disquieting, as much a search for the self as an imagined body of water in the middle of the desert. I savored this novel, reading it slowly over a couple of weeks, its airy and restless voice always in my head almost like a narcotic, but I could have read it in one night. Madeleine Watts is a startlingly good writer who holds nothing back." —Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy
"Brilliant and breathtaking . . . gives a precise glimpse into a world and a woman coming undone. I want everyone to read this provocative, perfect book." --Jeannie Vanasco, author of The Glass Eye
"Fulfilling a need for fiction that deals with the climate crisis. I'm so glad this exists. Brilliant." --Olivia Sudjic, author of Sympathy
"Madeleine Watts has delivered us the kind of messy, adrift female narrator we so rarely get to see: a restless young woman gazing towards adulthood from the perch she's built on booze, risky sex, and all the trappings of the sweaty, clawing space of post-college listlessness. Reading this book felt like stepping inside her skin, and I kept living there for days after I reached the end. The Inland Sea announces a voice and mind as brazen and bright as the Australian sun that radiates off every page of this novel" —Kristen Radtke, author of Imagine Wanting Only This