FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LAST ORDERS AND MOTHERING SUNDAY.
One summer morning in 1943, lock-keeper Henry Crick finds the drowned body of a sixteen-year-old boy. Nearly forty years later, his son Tom, a history teacher, is driven by a bizarre marital crisis and the provocation of one of his students to forsake the formal teaching of history-and tell stories . . .
Waterland is a classic of modern fiction: a vision of England seen through its mysterious, amphibious Fen country; a sinuous meditation on the workings of time; a tale of two families, startling in its twists and turns and universal in its reach. Compulsively readable, it is a novel of resonant depth and encyclopaedic richness, mixing human and natural history and exploring the tragic forces that take us both forwards and back. It is also a book about beer, eels, the French Revolution, the end of the world, windmills, will-o'-the-wisps, murder, love, education, curiosity and-supremely-the malign and merciful element of water.
'A quite brilliant novel' Daily Telegraph
'Inspired' New York Times
Graham Swift was born in 1949. He is the author of eleven novels, most recently Here We Are; three collections of short stories, including the highly praised England and Other Stories; and Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry and reflections on his life in writing. With Waterland he won the Guardian Fiction Prize and with Last Orders the Booker Prize. Mothering Sunday became a worldwide bestseller and won the Hawthornden Prize for best work of imaginative literature. All three novels were made into films. His books have appeared in over thirty-five languages.
