'Throughout this blighted coming-of-age story, Ms. Praise For This Book A Glamour Best New Book of the MonthĪ Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the YearĪ Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year At a time when wildfires have swept an entire continent, this novel asks what refuge and comfort looks like in a constant state of emergency. Interweaving a woman’s self-destructive unraveling with the gradual worsening of the climate crisis, The Inland Sea is charged with unflinching insight into our age of anxiety. Oxley never found the inland sea, but the myth was taken up by other men, and over the years, search parties walked out into the desert, dying as they tried to find it. Two centuries earlier, her great-great-great-great-grandfather–the British explorer John Oxley–traversed the wilderness of Australia in search of water. During her free time, she gets black-out drunk, hooks up with strangers, and navigates an affair with an ex-lover whose girlfriend is in their circle of friends. And yet the stress of listening to far-off disasters seeps into her personal life, and she begins walking home with keys in hand, ready to fight off men disappointed by what they find in neighboring bars. The work becomes monotonous: answer, transfer, repeat. Callers report car accidents and violent spouses and homes caught up in flame. Over the course of an eight-hour shift, she is dropped into hundreds of crises, hearing only pieces of each. In this “eloquent debut,” a young Australian woman unable to find her footing in the world begins to break down when the emergencies she hears working as a 911 operator and the troubles within her own life gradually blur together, forcing her to grapple with how the past has shaped her present ( Publishers Weekly).ĭrifting after her final year in college, a young writer begins working part-time as an emergency dispatch operator in Sydney.

The Inland Sea by Madeleine Watts