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A Novel
by Daisy Johnson
From the Booker Prize finalist and author of Sisters: a haunting novel about the complexities of motherhood, nested within three generations of women and children searching for each other to find themselves.
Found alone on a remote island as a toddler, Ori grows up mired in the mystery of what happened to the young mother who left her. When Ori welcomes a child of her own, years later, maternal doubt creeps in. As sleepless nights slacken her grip on reality, she travels back through memory to that stormy island, waiting in the shadow of a beaconless lighthouse, straining hopefully for the sound of her mother's return.
In ways she doesn't yet understand, Ori's unraveling binds her to her mother and grandmother, whose lives were also shaped by the brutal intimacies of motherhood. But can exhuming the past alter the future? Is Ori's fate—and the fate of her child—intractably tethered to the secrets of those who came before her?
Set in the uncanny, coastal England of Daisy Johnson's imagination, Long Wave immerses the reader in a physical landscape reflective of the novel's intense, interior drama. With the hypnotic language, ferocious emotion, and inventive imagery she is known for, Johnson offers a masterfully layered and moving story that looks beyond traditional understandings of family to examine the many elemental forces of generation and transplantation that graft us to one another.
"Looping through many years and many lives as it explores caregiving and failures of caregiving, this book is at once quiet and intense, at once devastating and heartening. I was carried by Johnson's potent prose, and I was moved by these intersecting perspectives." —Helen Phillips, author of Hum and The Need
"Long Wave, Daisy Johnson's best novel in an already spectacular career, uncovers heart-rending truths in a multi-generational story of secrets, obsessions, and love. Hopeful, tragic, beautiful, captivating, consuming. A remarkable achievement—such depth, but also what a page-turner!" —New York Times bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer
This information about Long Wave was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Daisy Johnson is the author of the novels Everything Under, a finalist for the 2018 Booker Prize, and Sisters, a New York Times notable book of the year, as well as the short story collection, Fen. She lives in Oxford, England.
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