Long Wave - by Daisy Johnson (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"Her strongest work yet...simply stunning." --The Guardian

"Daisy Johnson's best novel in an already spectacular career...Hopeful, tragic, beautiful, captivating, consuming. A remarkable achievement." --Jeff VanderMeer, author of Annihilation

"At once devastating and heartening." --Helen Phillips, author of The Need

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.

Review Quotes

"What a joy it is to read a writer who so confidently prioritizes character and language above gimmick or twist... Johnson goes far deeper than before in her examination of love and fear and separation, and as a result creates a work that will endure with readers long after they have closed its pages." --The Guardian

"A sweeping epic that is miraculously imagined and prismatically rendered in gorgeous prose. This book feels like a living, breathing thing, a creature all its own. Utterly stunning." --Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch

"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 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!" --Jeff VanderMeer, author of Annihilation

"Johnson writes of motherhood as a ferocious toppling, family as lightning that brachiates and crackles through a life. This is a novel of startling force. Readers will feel Long Wave in their teeth and bones." --C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold

"An astonishingly beautiful novel that remains grounded in the profound relationships between its characters. Long Wave is a triumph." --Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time

"Long Wave has the gravity of an epic... a gripping mystery and an unflinchingly observed treatise on the maelstrom of motherhood."--Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Mercies

"Atmospheric and haunting." --Booklist

About the Author

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.