Long Wave

Long Wave, Daisy Johnson’s best novel in an already spectacular career, uncovers heart-rending truths in a multi-generational story of secrets, obsessions, and love. Hopeful, tragic, beautiful, captivating, consuming. A remarkable achievement — such depth, but also what a page-turner! – Jeff VanderMeerAn astonishingly beautiful novel with an unearthly sirenic power that remains grounded in the knotty, ambivalent and profound relationships between its characters – mothers, daughters, lovers, the lost. Long Wave is a triumph – Kaliane BradleyThe power of Johnson’s storytelling is elemental, fundamental, irresistible. Long Wave has the gravity of an epic and is her greatest achievement yet: a gripping mystery, a series of impeccable character portraits, and an unflinchingly observed treatise on the maelstrom of motherhood. Masterful – Kiran Millwood HargraveJohnson writes of motherhood as a ferocious toppling, family as lightning that brachiates and crackles through a life. This is a novel of startling force. Readers will feel Long Wave in their teeth and bones – C Pam ZhangIn Long Wave, Daisy Johnson explores caregiving and failures of caregiving. Looping through many years and many lives, this book is at once quiet and intense, at once devastating and heartening. I was carried by Johnson’s potent prose, and I was moved by these intersecting perspectives – Helen PhillipsI was gripped by this haunting story of mothers and children pushed right to the edges. Daisy Johnson’s world feels painfully real, and yet bristles with magic – Becky BarnicoatDaisy Johnson is a fierce and magical writer and I love her books. In Long Wave she directs her electric attention to early motherhood, its fevers and anguish, and how dreaming is passed between generations of women. I am, as always, in awe of her – Liz BerryLyrical and hypnotic, Daisy Johnson’s latest novel is a haunting tale of families and loss, spanning generations of women, each in turn fearful yet drawn to their own motherhood… An unsettling, propulsive read that doesn’t shy away from the complexities of both being a mother, and a daughter. * Cold Magazine *

Daisy Johnson was born in 1990. Her debut short-story collection, Fen, was published in 2016. In 2018 she became the youngest author ever to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize with her debut novel, Everything Under. Her 2020 novel Sisters was adapted into the 2024 feature film September Says. She is the winner of the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize, A. M. Heath Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her debut play, Viola’s Room, was produced in 2024 by the immersive theatre company Punchdrunk. She currently lives in Oxford by the river.

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