The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again cover art

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

By: M. John Harrison
Narrated by: Max Dowler
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

*WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2020*

*A New Statesman Book of the Year*

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.

©2020 M. John Harrison (P)2020 Orion Publishing Group Fiction First Contact Science Fiction

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Blood Meridian cover art
Inch Levels cover art
Expect Me Tomorrow cover art
A Bird in Winter cover art
In a Lonely Place cover art
Granta cover art
The Morning Star cover art
Train Dreams cover art
The Woman in the Dunes cover art
We Were Young cover art
Looking for Eliza cover art
The First Wife cover art

Critic reviews

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

'Brilliantly unsettling' Olivia Laing 'A magificent book.' Neil Gaiman

'An extraordinary experience' William Gibson
All stars
Most relevant
The prose of the book is excellent and stimulating, leading you ever more into the story and seeking answers. It is nothing like anything else I have read. Ultimately, I found it wanting at the end, although I see that is perhaps, the purpose of the author.

Peculiar, disturbing story, but well written

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Language and landscape. M. John Harrison seems to know my experience of living in the geology of London & Bridgnorth as our generation witness the emergence of the Anthropocene. Startlingly knowing & amusing.

Exquisitely English

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

I am a fan of 'Climbers' by Harrison. Acute obsevations and the vivid characters and great landscape writing. It was starkly honest and it had me re-reading it quite soon after I finished. This novel is also beautiful, and thoughtful. It is grounded in the contemporary world with forays into the unknown. Is the unexplained weirdness real to the characters? An insanity, A crisis, perhaps. A sort of dual hallucination that entwines them, I have no answer, but I liked thinking about it..

As a rule I prefer books to ask questions rather than simply answer them. And so to try and answer another reviewer's (Jerold C's) question (Why is nothing resolved?) I would say because confusion is the human condition and to engage with another's confusion is to empathise. Curiosity is more active than observation.

Just my feeling.

A strange and curious vision

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Set in contemporary Brexit Britain but moored in the drab ambience of the early 80s, this follows two people - Shaw and Victoria - whose fish-out-of-water existences are... just that.
I find it hard to believe I haven’t heard of M John Harrison before, unless it’s because I’ve been readier to dismiss potential ‘genre’ writers than I thought.
MJH is a master of language and of prose style. I’m in awe of the understated yet mesmeric quality of his writing, and am going to find another of his to read / listen to straightaway. On which note, all credit to Max Dowler, whose narration was pitch perfect.

Unsettling, unearthly, undeniably brilliant

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The prose is great. The characters well defined. The hints of the strange engage and provide bait for narrative greed. But ultimately it's a story about nothing, using the tropes of horror and fantastic fiction. Lovely passages lead nowhere and the aimless characters' responses to the 'weird'start to really get on your nerves once you realise that nothing will be resolved. And that's early on in the text. I think this intentional. But why?

well written bollocks

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews