The Inland Sea

Book excerpt: A fierce and beautiful novel about coming of age in a dying world As she faces the open wilderness of adulthood, our narrator finds that the world around her is coming undone. She works as an emergency dispatch operator, trapped in constant crisis as fires and floods rage across Australia. Her personal life is buckling under her self-destructive obsessions - she drinks heaily, sleeps with strangers, wanders the streets of Sydney at night, and pursues a disastrous affair with an ex-lover. Desperate and adrift, she yearns for change. Building to a tightly controlled bushfire of ecological and personal crisis, The Inland Sea is a fierce and beautiful novel about the search for refuge in a state of emergency. Madeleine Watts grew up in Sydney, Australia and has lived in New York since 2013. She has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, and her fiction has been published in The White Review and The Lifted Brow. Her essays have appeared in The Believer and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her novella, Afraid of Waking It, was awarded the 2015 Griffith Review Novella Prize. The Inland Sea is her first novel.