Read moreīest for:Those looking for a well-written story where the person who is screwing up as they grow is a young woman, not a young man.In a nutshell:Our nameless (why are these women always without names) main character is just out of university, a writer, and living in Australia, where the world around her is slowly dying from climate change, while she both moves further away from her dreams and sets new ones to focus on.Worth quoting:“I thought being hurt would give my life an interesting kind of texture.”“At that point in my life, I don’t think that I had considered that anybody but myself had the capacity to feel things with any real integrity.”Why I chose it:This was the other book in the Books That Matter subscription I received.Review:Hmmm.First off, this book is filled with really lovely, evocative language. Her novella, Afraid of Waking It, was awarded the 2015 Griffith Review Novella Prize. Her essays have appeared in The Believer and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, and her fiction has been published in The White Review and The Lifted Brow. Madeleine Watts grew up in Sydney, Australia and has lived in New York since 2013. Desperate and adrift, she yearns for change.īuilding 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. 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.

She works as an emergency dispatch operator, trapped in constant crisis as fires and floods rage across Australia. A fierce and beautiful novel about coming of age in a dying worldĪs she faces the open wilderness of adulthood, our narrator finds that the world around her is coming undone.

The Inland Sea by Madeleine Watts