Sunken land begins to rise again (Orion Publishing Co)

Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2020, this is fiction that pushes the boundaries of the novel form. Shaw had a breakdown, but he's getting himself back together. He has a single room, a job on a decaying London barge, and an on-off affair with a doctor's daughter called Victoria, who claims to have seen her first corpse at age thirteen.

It's not ideal, but it's a life. Or it would be if Shaw hadn't got himself involved in a conspiracy theory that, on dark nights by the river, seems less and less theoretical... Meanwhile, Victoria is up in the Midlands, renovating her dead mother's house, trying to make new friends.

But what, exactly, happened to her mother$346 Why has the local waitress disappeared into a shallow pool in a field behind the house$347 And why is the town so obsessed with that old Victorian morality tale, The Water Babies$348 As Shaw and Victoria struggle to maintain their relationship, the sunken lands are rising up again, unnoticed in the shadows around them.