Groundwater

Thomas McMullan (Author)

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Pre-order. Available 04 Nov 2025

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Description

By the winner of the Betty Trask Prize – an atmospheric and powerfully menacing story about family, secrets and violence

'Groundwater masterfully and subtly begins to re-enchant all that we have reduced' Amber Husain
'Richly unsettling ... A masterclass in apprehension' Daily Mail
'A masterful portrait of the fractious, shimmering webs underneath our not-so ordinary lives' Sophie Mackintosh
'This is a novel that gets right under your skin' Ella Frears

John and Liz have left the city behind to move to a remote house on the shores of the lake. Though the house is barely unpacked, Liz's sister, with her children and her husband, have come to visit for the August bank holiday weekend.

Over the course of a hot, slow weekend, tensions simmer; things go unsaid – between the two couples, between the two sisters. Their time together is punctured by visits from Jim, the solitary local warden for the area; and a group of students camping nearby draw closer and closer, finally infiltrating the house – and bringing their own tensions and hierarchies with them.

As the weekend draws to a close, the landscape reveals a violence that has long lain hidden – and the summer builds to its harrowing climax.

Taut and menacing, full of disquiet and tenderness, Groundwater is about the gulfs that lies between us and those we love – and the miraculous ways our deepest desires and fears manifest.

Product details

Published	04 Nov 2025
Format	Hardback
Edition	1st
Extent	304
ISBN	9781526678027
Imprint	Bloomsbury Publishing
Dimensions	216 x 135 mm
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Author

Thomas McMullan

Thomas McMullan lives and works in London. His deb…

A ruthless and minutely observed reckoning with the stories, beliefs, and places we make to shelter from fear of death

AMBER HUSAIN
McMullan's shape-shifting novel is a masterclass in apprehension, exposing the fissures between an imagined life and its reality with stealthy power, and boldly upending reader expectations. Richly unsettling

DAILY MAIL
It is Thomas McMullan's ability to cultivate this feeling - that all speech is somehow arbitrary, that all outcomes are somehow just a die's role away - that gives this disquieting, suspenseful novel its strength ... What animates the novel is a series of tensions: between material stability and emotional turmoil; idealism and conformity; speech and silence; love in the abstract and love in practice; between a life and the life. McMullan handles these tensions deftly

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Beautiful, poetic, a cut above ... Moves between languid and downright creepy

SHORTLIST
As uncanny and fretful as a nightmare, Groundwater is nonetheless rooted in a totally real place and is populated with a cast of completely convincing characters. The Hell which is other people is meticulously painted here with humour, imagination and genuine poignancy

AIDAN COTTRELL BOYCE
McMullan is a skilled cartographer of interior worlds, tracing the unspoken thoughts and feelings that lie beneath the surface

BUZZ MAGAZINE