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