Long Wave: A Novel

“Her strongest work yetsimply 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

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 doesnt yet understand, Oris 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 Oris fateand the fate of her childintractably tethered to the secrets of those who came before her?

Set in the uncanny, coastal England of Daisy Johnsons imagination, Long Wave immerses the reader in a physical landscape reflective of the novels 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.