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 VanderMeer
An 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 Bradley
The 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 Hargrave
Johnson 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 Zhang
An extraordinary, masterful, magnificent book. Daisy Johnson has been away, plumbing the river’s depths, and brought us back something magical. I read it in a kind of trance, profoundly moved, held aloft by its strange currents. It took me places I never expected; the best novel I’ve read all year. – Helen Jukes
I 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 Barnicoat
In 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 Phillips
Daisy 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 Berry
A reader who is willing to sit with the uncertainty will be richly rewarded…Johnson’s command of language is simply stunning…what a joy it is to read a writer who so confidently prioritises character and language above gimmick or twist… a work that will endure with readers long after they have closed its pages. – Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett * Guardian *
The psychological disruptions of childhood that unfold in a semi-mythical English pastoral setting belong to an expanding oeuvre that includes novels by Sarah Moss and Max Porter. Long Wave is suffused with the same eeriness. Atmosphere is everything here: a strangely fused sorrow and mysticism… its unsettling elusiveness… [is] part of its weird power * Financial Times *

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, the 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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