IN the first review from Maldon Books writer and booklover Billie-Jean Johnson gives her thoughts on Sarah Moss's new novel, Summerwater

If Sarah Moss's last novel, Ghost Wall, was a product of the earth, then Summerwater is a product of the sky. The lashing storm building throughout the novel seems almost otherworldly, at first shrugged off as ordinary Scottish rain, but forever building in its unnerving relentlessness until it threatens to swallow the characters whole.

"It's not right, this kind of downpour," one character tells

us, "It's as if the weather's got stuck, as if the whole arrangement, the Gulf Stream and the space winds, the water cycle itself, stuff we don't notice, has stopped."

Despite being written before lockdown was a consideration, this is a novel about entrapment, and the ways we break away from it, whether running, or kayaking, or just fixating on a bacon bap

instead of on achieving mutual orgasms with your fiancé. Moss's novel is fascinated with the ways we break from our cages, and the ways we simply dream of doing so.

Set across one day in a small Scottish holiday park, the narrators are trapped. Trapped inside their cabins, thanks to the weather, and trapped inside their own heads, judging their families, their

neighbours, and themselves most of all. Like many of Moss's other works, the novel concerns itself with class, gender, history, and place. Characters judge each other's cars, accents, clothes, and most of all, the Ukrainian family staying at the end of the row of houses.

Moss's skill comes in drawing out the voice in the back of people's heads. She doesn't shy away from the vicious bits of people - the old woman who is impressed by the young pregnant woman's ferocity as she swears at her, the little girl who plays mind games with her overly-anxious mother, the teenager who wants to be sick at the sight of soup in his dad's beard.

She ekes these details out, moving between the landscape and the internal while forgoing the front. Moss knows the value of sparsity. She doesn't waste time on dialogue or appearance, instead fixing with an ease of acuity onto the heart of the matter.

Intricately woven and effortlessly told, Summerwater is a pleasure to behold, and one can only hope that Moss's next novel comes to us soon.

Summerwater is available in store at Maldon Books or online at at Maldon Books here.