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

AMBER HUSAIN

McMullan is attuned to tone, texture, even breath ... Tender and dreamlike ... Digs into emotional fault lines and lays bare simmering tensions

LITERARY REVIEW

Unsettling and seductive ... A disquieting study in estrantement, mortality and the fragile membranes between past and present, surface and depth. Groundwater invites us to recognise that we too live atop hidden depths, where the parasocial and environmental, the self and the wild, are bound in ways we barely understand

IRISH TIMES

Complex and chilling ... A finely drawn portrait not only of a couple in crisis, but of a world on the verge of disaster. Though anchored in the ordinary, this nimble-footed novel wrestles with the “desperate and self-serving need to enshrine the self” - work, having children, even the creation of art - in the face of catastrophe. McMullan writes with a masterful naturalism

FINANCIAL TIMES

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