Waterland
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Set against the flat, watery fenlands of East Anglia, Waterland is a mesmerising and deeply unsettling masterwork that chronicles the fractured life of Tom Crick, a history teacher whose personal demons force him to abandon the curriculum in favour of something far more urgent — the story of his own past. When Tom's wife is committed to a psychiatric institution after abducting a baby, he turns to his students with a haunting confession, unravelling generations of family secrets, murder, madness, and the relentless, silting passage of time. Swift weaves together the history of the Fens themselves — that eerily reclaimed land, always threatening to return to water — with the intimate, devastating history of the Crick and Atkinson families, creating a narrative as layered and unpredictable as the tides. A landmark of British postmodern fiction, Waterland presents history not as a grand, linear progression, but as a cyclical and deeply personal act of storytelling — a compulsion to make sense of what refuses to be explained. Swift's prose is both elegiac and visceral, drawing on myth, local folklore, and the biology of the eel with the same scholarly intensity he brings to human desire and grief. Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, the novel confirms Swift as one of the most formidable voices in contemporary British literature, leaving the reader to wonder whether any story truly ends, or whether it simply returns, like floodwater, to claim us again.
Author: Graham Swift
Format: Hardback
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Set against the flat, watery fenlands of East Anglia, Waterland is a mesmerising and deeply unsettling masterwork that chronicles the fractured life of Tom Crick, a history teacher whose personal demons force him to abandon the curriculum in favour of something far more urgent — the story of his own past. When Tom's wife is committed to a psychiatric institution after abducting a baby, he turns to his students with a haunting confession, unravelling generations of family secrets, murder, madness, and the relentless, silting passage of time. Swift weaves together the history of the Fens themselves — that eerily reclaimed land, always threatening to return to water — with the intimate, devastating history of the Crick and Atkinson families, creating a narrative as layered and unpredictable as the tides. A landmark of British postmodern fiction, Waterland presents history not as a grand, linear progression, but as a cyclical and deeply personal act of storytelling — a compulsion to make sense of what refuses to be explained. Swift's prose is both elegiac and visceral, drawing on myth, local folklore, and the biology of the eel with the same scholarly intensity he brings to human desire and grief. Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, the novel confirms Swift as one of the most formidable voices in contemporary British literature, leaving the reader to wonder whether any story truly ends, or whether it simply returns, like floodwater, to claim us again.