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The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2020

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The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

By: M. John Harrison
Narrated by: Max Dowler
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*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, from the author of the 2026 Booker Prize shortlisted The End of Everything.

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. Fiction First Contact Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Magical Realism Psychological Science Fiction
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Critic reviews

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.
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.
One of the strangest and most unsettling novels of the year
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
Uncanny and exquisite
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is a novel so good all the usual reviewerish superlatives barely seem superlative enough. (Adam Roberts)
Harrison's unsettling and melancholy novel, gritted with farce and dreadful laughter, shouts award-winner on every page.
Richly textured...slippery and seedy.
A deeply unsettling fever dream of a novel. 4.5 out of 5.
[There is] beauty and precision of [Harrison's] psychogeographic prose. 9.4/10.
Masterful and deeply affecting.
This excellent book may be the most unsettling piece of fiction you read this year...
Harrison is a linguistic artist, constructing sentences that wrap and weave like a stream of consciousness without ever breaking focus.
Unset­tling, brilliant, and pretty much unlike anything anyone else is doing.
Beautifully written, utterly compelling, and like much of Harrison's works, there are scenes of such sublime strangeness that they linger in the mind long after the novel is over. As such it is another triumph from one of our finest writers, and essential reading for 2020
One of the best writers of fiction currently at work in English
A stunning masterpiece
Treads the line between realism and fantasy with immense assurance and draws a portrait of watery, post-Brexit Britain that brings shivers of both unease and recognition (Jonathan Coe, author of international bestseller Middle England)
As ominous and bizarre as the title suggests. This funny, unsettling book is better left undescribed, but 'post-Brexit England haunted by green fish-people growing out of toilet bowls' should, uh, whet the appetite (Rory Scothorne)
Slippery and dreamlike, a profoundly and eerily disquieting experience . . . future critics will find in his writing a distinct, clear-eyed vision of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century life
Brilliantly unsettling
M. John Harrison's masterpiece
Absolutely astonishing
A magnificent book
An extraordinary experience
A mesmerising, mysterious book . . . Haunting. Worrying. Beautiful
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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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