Summerwater: A Novel

By Sarah Moss

A BEST BOOK OF JANUARY: O Magazine

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR in the UK: The Guardian, The Times

“[Moss] writes beautifully about... souls in tumult, about people whose lives have not turned out the way they’d hoped. . .There’s little doubt, reading Moss, that you’re in the hands of a sophisticated and gifted writer." —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

The acclaimed author of Ghost Wall offers a new, devastating, masterful novel of subtle menace

They rarely speak to each other, but they take notice—watching from the safety of their cabins, peering into the half-lit drizzle of a Scottish summer day, making judgments from what little they know of their temporary neighbors. On the longest day of the year, the hours pass nearly imperceptibly as twelve people go from being strangers to bystanders to allies, their attention forced into action as tragedy sneaks into their lives.

At daylight, a mother races up the mountain, fleeing into her precious dose of solitude. A retired man studies her return as he reminisces about the park’s better days. A young woman wonders about his politics as she sees him head for a drive with his wife, and tries to find a moment away from her attentive boyfriend. A teenage boy escapes the scrutiny of his family, braving the dark waters of the loch in a kayak. This cascade of perspective shows each wrapped up in personal concerns, unknown to each other, as they begin to notice one particular family that doesn’t seem to belong. Tensions rise, until nightfall brings an irrevocable turn.

From Sarah Moss, the acclaimed author of Ghost Wall—a “riveting” (Alison Hagy, The New York Times Book Review) “sharp tale of suspense” (Margaret Tablot, The New Yorker), Summerwater is a searing exploration of our capacity for kinship and cruelty, and a gorgeous evocation of the natural world that bears eternal witness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jan 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9780374719579

Sarah Moss

Sarah Moss is the author of several novels and a memoir of her year living in Iceland, Names for the Sea, shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her novels are Summerwater, Cold Earth, Night Waking, Bodies of Light (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize), Signs for Lost Children (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize), The Tidal Zone (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize) and Ghost Wall, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2019. Sarah was born in Glasgow and grew up in the north of England. After moving between Oxford, Canterbury, Reykjavik and West Cornwall, she now lives in the Midlands and is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick.

Book preview

the sounds of blood and air

Dawn. There’s no sunrise, no birdsong.

---

Light seeps over the water, through the branches. The sky is lying on the loch, filling the trees, heavy in the spaces between the pine needles, settling between blades of grass and mottling the pebbles on the beach. Although there’s no distance between cloud and land, nowhere for rain to fall, it is raining; the sounds of water on leaves and bark, on roofs and stones, windows and cars, become as constant as the sounds of blood and air in your own body.

---

You would notice soon enough, if it stopped.

she could have kept going

JUSTINE HAS SLEPT the way she used to sleep before taking a morning flight. You wake to check the time, reach out in the dark for your phone, for the button you can find in your sleep. It tells you not yet, there are hours still, hours you can spend warm and oblivious, almost as many as when you last looked.

You dream of packing and hurrying, and wake again: it must be nearly time, might even be late, but only twenty minutes have passed. Sleep again, wake again, the short summer night lasting implausible hours, something deep in your brain, some ancient bit of wiring or plumbing originally developed to deal with the beginning of the salmon run or the week the berries ripen, unable to settle. She can’t set an alarm because it would wake Steve, but something in her mind – in the part that looks after the breathing and the heart and the listening for the kids while she’s asleep – knows the time, reads the tilt of the earth and the turn of the sky.

---

She opens her eyes, looks at the pine panelling not a foot from her face, at the knots in the wood and the bubbles in the varnish rough to the touch, like scabbed skin. There won’t be a plane this summer, or next. Who could afford to travel, now? If she’d known, she thinks, if she’d known that she wasn’t going to achieve financial comfort or even security as the years went by, if she’d recognised the good times when she had them, she’d have travelled more when she was young, she’d have bought one of those train tickets, those passes, and gone everywhere, northern Norway to Sicily, Istanbul to County Clare. She’d have taken a year out, several years out, before settling for Steve, worked her way round waitressing or whatever. If she’d had the confidence then, if she’d known how to apply for a passport and buy a ticket and board a plane when she was young enough to walk away. She should have gone to Paris and Vienna, to Venice. It’s hard to imagine now how she’ll ever see vineyards terraced above a sparkling sea, olives ripening silver-leaved or a sunlit orange grove. It probably doesn’t matter, really. But she would have liked the kids to hear languages they don’t speak, or don’t speak yet, to eat food they don’t recognise, to cross roads with the cars on the wrong side, see with their own eyes that the world is wide and ways of doing things mostly just habit. Not that you can’t still hear languages in Manchester, of course. Not that there aren’t strange things to eat. Not that her kids will eat strange things, not that they’ve shown any interest in languages.

---

Anyway, here it is, 5 a.m., as planned, daylight already. Time to get out and back and showered before the boys are wanting breakfast. Other people lie in, on holiday, especially after being kept awake half the night by those selfish fuckers with their loud music who must have known they were ruining the sleep and hence the next day for all the little kids and their parents and the old folk and all. Justine didn’t much mind, just read on her tablet until she was sleepy enough not to be bothered, and the kids slept right through the way they sleep through the smoke alarm at home – always cheering, that – but Steve got his knickers in a bit of a twist and Justine bets that family with the baby had a bad night, right next door to it as well. They’ve had parties twice this week, not really a problem you expect out here, away at the end of the road, it’s where you come for peace and quiet – anyway, she inches herself to the edge of the bed, not turning or rising or disarranging the duvet in any way that would subject Steve to a draught, not that it ever occurs to him to moderate his own insomniac walrussing to save her rest, coughing and scratching and throwing himself around. He won’t even sit down to pee now he’s started getting up in the middle of the night, would rather wake her pissing like a horse than sit like a woman just the once. It’s a thin partition, she says, I can hear everything, it’s not nice. It puts you off, lying there listening to aggressive peeing from someone who could perfectly well just bloody sit down but won’t because in his head the masculinity police are watching even in the middle of the night, hiding, peering in through the windows or crouching in the laundry basket. Which is admittedly big enough for a couple of coppers. She has no idea how she’ll get all the clothes dry in this weather, not that you come to Scotland expecting sun but this is really a bit much, day after day of it, torrential – all very well the cabin coming with a washing machine but it’s actually less hassle to wash things by hand than dry them without a dryer. Getting wet is always the easy part. She rolls neatly to her feet and dips her head while everything blurs and dims and rings and then comes back into focus. Low blood pressure, she’ll live for ever. She’s learnt the creaks of this floor now, makes a long stride over the worn patch. Steve’ll whinge if she wakes him, try to get her to have sex instead of running, easy enough to fend him off but then she’s started the day, started the ticking clock of what she ought to be doing, wife and mother, on holiday, cleaning and breakfast and fun for the kids, making memories and making sure to photograph them in case they turn out not to be memorable after all. She sidles where the carpet is unworn. Christ this carpet, what were the owners thinking? Back-street pub circa 1988, that’s what. Even if it’s clean, it makes you think they’re hiding filth, like the upholstery in a bus.

---

She floats paper in the loo to muffle the noise, sits forward, doesn’t flush. Washes her hands properly, Imperial Leather for a nostalgic holiday treat, always takes her back, used to seem so posh thirty years ago in Libby’s house where they also had branded biscuits and real Coke. You’re not supposed to put soap on your face at her age, dries the skin and gives you wrinkles, but she likes the tight clean feeling and she doesn’t have dry skin or wrinkles. She scoops water into her mouth, the taste different from at home, more like the smell of outside, growing plants and damp earth. Another handful, not that she’ll sweat much in the rain but it’s easier with more fluids on board.

---

She left her kit ready in here last night. Yesterday’s knickers, they’ll be in the wash as soon as she’s back; the moment of fear as she fights to get her elbows through her sports bra. One of these days, she thinks, one of these days a woman is going to die doing this, or at least dislocate her shoulder, and it’ll be worse getting it off all wet. She probably doesn’t need it anyway, the special tight bra, but they always say you must, however tiny your tits, or terrible things will happen. Running socks, Steve has no idea how expensive but they do make a difference and she’s just the one pair, cheap vest top made in Bangladesh doubtless by kids younger than hers but what can you do (not buy it, obviously). The thing about running in the rain is to wear as little as possible, your skin’s waterproof and it’s layers of wet fabric that make you cold, not to mention the chafing. Capri leggings, she’s not shaved her legs, no point in this weather, but any other loon out there in this rain will have better things to think about.

---

She looks in the mirror. So maybe she was wrong about the wrinkles. So what?

---

Both hands to ease the door handle, stop at the children’s door to unravel two sets of breathing, dither about whether to take the one key leaving them locked in and needing to go through the windows in a fire, the windows being low and easy to open and there being no plausible cause of fire just now, or leave the key meaning that she can’t lock the door and there are three beloved souls sleeping undefended in the woods, or at least two beloved souls and one mostly tolerated one. Fire, she thinks, is more likely than murderous nutters, you do hear of psychopaths hanging out in holiday parks but only in America and the good thing about being at the end of a ten-mile single-track road is that the getaway options are crap. Unless, of course, the nutter plans to hide in the woods until dark, but there’s not much dark this time of year and wouldn’t the police bring dogs? Or he could swim across the loch, at least if he’d thought to bring a wetsuit. Or she. Women can probably be serial killers too, wasn’t there one in Japan, though that was life-insurance fraud more than sadism, not that it makes much difference to the victims, though a fraudster probably kills you faster than a sadist so maybe it does. You’d need to get into the wetsuit before embarking on your murderous games, not something you want to be doing between committing a crime and leaving the scene, even worse than putting on a sports bra. Jesus, look at that rain. There’s almost no point putting clothes on for that, if she’d brought her swimming costume she’d wear it. One thing, it can’t keep up like that all day, there can’t be that much water up there. She sits on the veranda to fasten her shoes, to adjust her armband and choose her music. She should probably run mindfully here, listening to the wind in the trees and the lapping of the loch and any birds deranged enough to attempt flight in the deluge but fuck that, she needs music for her feet, music to connect her feet to the ground so she doesn’t have to think about it. It’s not, she sees, even half-five yet, she can have two hours if she wants them, get in a quick 20k, though if she does that she’ll be eating all day and the kids wanting a snack every time they see her but she knows she’s going to do it anyway. She’s got four peanut protein bars tucked into her packet of sanitary towels in the suitcase, the only place no one else is likely to look, and she’s not too proud to eat them in the bathroom if she has to.

---

And off, feet pattering, heart and lungs surprised, labouring. Cold water on bed-warm skin and why is she doing this again, exactly? The holiday park is asleep, curtains drawn, cars beaded with rain. The log cabins, she thinks again, are a stupid idea, borrowed from America or maybe Scandinavia but anyway somewhere it rains less than Scotland, when did you see wooden buildings anywhere in Britain? Turf, more like, up here, stone if you’ve got it, won’t rot. And they don’t look Nordic – not that she’s been but she’s seen pictures – they look dated, an unappealing muddle of softening wooden walls and cheap plastic windows, the sort of garden shed you’ll have to take down sooner rather than later. One thing to rent for a couple of weeks, even if obviously the wrong couple of weeks, weather-wise, but even if you had the means wouldn’t it be an admission of defeat to buy one? You’ve only to look at the woodwork to see that they’re depreciating assets anyway, if you’ve got money you might as well spend it on visas and plane tickets and not pass what are supposed to be the best weeks of the year watching a loch fill with rain. She must check the bank balance, next time there’s internet. Steve was right, she’ll admit that, camping would have been a mistake, worse than staying at home, but they’re not cheap, these chalets, not in the school holidays. She’ll be needing to buy new uniforms for the boys when they get back, Noah’s ankles poking out of his trousers weeks before the end of last term and she needs to dig out his old plimsolls for Eddie and isn’t the car needing its MOT before the end of the month? They can always just not drive it for a couple of weeks till the salaries come in, done that before, her on her bike and Steve on the bus, it’s a luxury anyway, really, the car, they should maybe sell it while it’s still worth something. She leaps a puddle, feels a cold muscle stretch. She could do anything, this hour of the morning, steal laundry sagging from racks on a couple of verandas – that won’t work, she thinks, the air’s too damp, they’ll have to take it in – nick a boat from the pontoon and go explore the islands, set fire to one of these stupid big cars that will be dry enough underneath, but she won’t because she’s running now, you don’t stop once you’ve started, not even to set fire to things that need burning down. She’d thought maybe that old couple next door might be stirring, she saw him this time yesterday sitting with his tea and the French windows open onto the rain, they say old people wake early. Maybe he’s awake and reading in bed. Maybe he and his wife lie together in the mornings, talking, or even

Reviews for Summerwater

[cariola_6 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The author had an interesting concept for this collection of interrelated stories. It focuses on the people spending a holiday in a group of vacation rentals on a loch in northern Scotland. Each chapter focuses on a different resident (and some 1-2 page chapters on local residents including a deer, a fox, and other critters). Unfortunately, they are plagued by typical Scottish weather: rain, rain and more rain. The vacationers include an elderly couple, a retired doctor and his ailing wife; a family with three young children (the eldest daughter has a nasty streak); another with two typically surly teenagers who would rather be at home and are dismayed by the lack of cell phone reception; a newly married couple (perhaps the only ones happy to be confined indoors); a couple with two young boys, the mother of whom is addicted to running, even in the rain); and a group of Eastern European immigrants (it's never clear exactly where they are from), all adults except for one obviously lonely little girl. The latter party a lot, to the dismay of some residents due to the noise and to others because they aren't invited to join in.About halfway through, I started to wish that I was done with 'Summerwater,' not because it was bad but because I just wasn't in the mood for something this dreary, dismal and depressing. The writing is very good, the characters all well fleshed out (although some were stereotypes), and their interactions provided a window onto today's society. Maybe it was just the wrong book at the wrong time for me.

[josephcamilleri-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Summerwater, the latest novel(la) by Sarah Moss, is set in a cabin park in the Trossachs, where several disparate families are on holiday. Although its ‘action’ is spread over one long (rainy) summer’s day, the novel does not follow a traditional narrative and does not really have a plot – at least, not in the conventional sense. This notwithstanding, it is very tautly structured, and one of its striking characteristics is its formal elegance.

Each of its short chapters is written from the point of view of one of the residents of the different lodges. These chapters are, in turn, separated by brief vignettes (barely a page in length), in which the focus shifts to the natural world. Half-way through the novel, we start revisiting each of the cabins, through the thoughts of a different resident, giving the book a vaguely palindromic feel. The only characters in the story whose viewpoint we do not get to share are, tellingly, the holidaymakers who are seen as outsiders by the rest – a Ukrainian group with a penchant for noisy, boozy parties and an Iraqi war veteran who is staying in a tent in the woods.

Summerwater shares some of its themes with Sarah Moss’s previous novel Ghost Wall. There is an underlying violence, which is only hinted at in the earlier parts of the book and comes to the surface at the end (although not exactly in the way one might expect). There are references to sexual/gender politics and feminist themes, as well as to the issues of racism and xenophobia. Finally, there’s a Hardyesque sense of “deep time” with the eternal cycles of nature serving as the backdrop to the transient tragedies of man. Surprisingly, the novel’s stream of consciousness approach leaves for a healthy streak of humour which balances the novel’s darker aspects.

I must admit that, on the whole, I enjoyed Summerwater less than Ghost Wall. Despite the author’s attempts to differentiate between the characters, the narrative voices seemed too similar, making it difficult to really empathize with the characters. Yet, there’s still much to admire in the book and, at novella length, it never outstays its welcome.

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A drowned summer holiday, on a lake in Scotland. The perpetual rain is not gone give you happy feelings, and this novel certainly isn't. As in a kaleidoscope, Moss gives the floor one by one to the temporary residents of a holiday center, each in their own bungalow, preoccupied with usually rather gloomy worries. She has spread the narrators nicely by age and gender, and also lets them spy a bit on each other. This is a process that allows her to gradually increase the tension, until the dramatic denouement at the end. Not really badly done, but not spectacular either. Both literary and story wise it felt a bit underwhelmed.

[arubabookwoman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The setting for this short novel is a group of summer cabins around a loch in remote Scotland. In a series of vignettes we are introduces to the various inhabitants of the cabins, their lives and concerns of the moment, beginning in the predawn hours with Justine, a young wife and mother going for her sacrosanct run--the only time she gets to herself. The novel proceeds episodically throughout the day, the cold Scottish rain ever present, as in each section we meet a new set of characters. There are several families with young children, a family with teenagers, an elderly couple, a young engaged couple, as well as a group of "foreigners" (Romanians) that several of the other vacationers feel are too loud. The novel ends with the events culminating in the Romanian cabin after midnight.At first this seems a quiet book, in which nothing much is happening. But with each episode, a sense of dread and forboding is being built. Although some reviews have described the book as being a "parade of inner lives" or "family life," in my view it is actually a psychological thriller.Recommended.3 1/2 stars

[proustitute_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Eerie, lyrical, poignant, unflinching: Sarah Moss’s Summerwater is a series of vignettes about families and couples on holiday in the Trossachs, where the rain pours down unrelentingly. We encounter many people whose paths all cross—a couple trying to orgasm together; an elderly couple with a growing distance between them due to the wife’s disability; a young girl who enjoys a swing that dangerously exists between loch and rocks, and who actually throws rocks at another girl for not belonging; a sixteen-year-old boy who doesn’t seem to realize while kayaking that he’s had a precarious run-in with death.

All of these brief inner lives are told in almost Woolfian streams of consciousness that are poetic and painful to read for their revelations about the depravity of human nature; perhaps more striking here is how Moss intersperses the longer, human vignettes with brief scenes showing human encroachment on the natural world, with the looming threat of climate change and a bleak, post-Brexit view of interpersonal relations.

As in Ghost Wall, Moss shows herself a master at shocking climaxes; again, I was reminded of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” in many ways, but Moss makes her shockers all her own.

Highly recommended. 4.5 stars.

[helenliz_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Goodness, this gets very claustrophobic. Starts as a set of isolated stories of each of the people who are staying in a wooden lodge set in a holiday park next to a Scottish loch. In the rain. A very very wet summer, with the rain almost being a character in its own right. In each story there is some dissatisfaction with life and some kind of underlying lie or supressed emotion that is not being shared. At times you hear from multiple members of the same lodge, and they often present a very different view of the position. At times they share the same dissatisfaction, at times it is a different uneasiness that underlies the narrative. The narrators vary in age from a child to an elderly couple. each comes equipped with their own world view and they view the park and the other inhabitants through their own lens. The violence, when it erupts, is somehow both shocking and entirely predictable. Each chapter from the view of the people is interspersed with a short vignette almost form the point of view of the loch, the forest, the birds and animals that are present. And yet in this too, the weather is a pervasive force that is unsettling. The gradually escalating tension does not make this a relaxing summer holiday read, but it does make it something you don't want to put down.

[streamsong_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

We’re told at the very beginning of the book that there will be deaths before the day is over.And then author [[Sarah Moss]] details the activities for the inhabitants of a vacation camp on the shores of a Scottish loch, following them all for one specific day. Each of the visitors, even the children, have weaknesses, foibles or anger that seem dangerous and make you wonder – is this the one? Is this the story? And the tension builds.And yet when the end comes, when the thing happens that we’ve been told from the very beginning, it’s unexpected with a shocking, unforgettable final line.Beautiful character building and world building – if a single day in one small tourist camp can be called a world.Still, although I was not as taken by it as by her earlier novel [The Wall, I’ll be looking forward to more by Sarah Moss.

[lauralkeet · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Summerwater is set in a remote Scottish holiday camp where several travelers are trying to make the best of things despite the incessant rain. Most looked forward to spending a week off the grid without cellular service, until being cooped up in damp cabins with little to do but watch your neighbors’ comings and goings.The novel unfolds over a single day, with each chapter one holidaymaker’s interior monologue. A woman goes for an early morning run, enjoying the solitude. Despite the weather, an elderly couple boards a ferry to visit one of their favorite spots. A teenage boy braves the elements in his kayak. Their narratives are both a commentary on the activity they’re engaged in, and observations about the people they see along the way. They speculate on the lives of their fellow travelers, never making direct personal contact. Haven’t we all done this? And yet there’s an ominous undertone, a sense that all of this is leading somewhere. Sarah Moss has a gift for building suspense through spare prose. Small details dropped in each narrative build a composite picture of life at the holiday camp. Some of those details turn out to be important; some are red herrings. I enjoyed getting to know the couples and families stuck on a holiday gone bad, all the while wondering when the other shoe was going to drop. And when it did, the pace went from zero to sixty in a flash, and delivered a knockout punch that continued to haunt my thoughts well after I closed the book.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A rainy August at a loch-side holiday park in Scotland. Stuck in the small cabins, the vacationers watch each other and the rain. Each chapter of this novel follows a different person stuck waiting for the rain to stop, from a girl and her brother annoyed by another girl interrupting their play, to the teenager so bored with being inside that he goes kayaking and discovers that he may have overestimated his abilities, to the young mother who jogs early in the morning to escape all the demands on her time. Moss is a wonderful writer, able to create complex characters in just a few paragraphs, and the picture she draws of this vacation site is one that appears stagnant, but that is teeming with life. This is a gorgeous and not entirely benign novel that is maybe just a touch shorter than it needed to be.

[samsattler · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Sarah Moss’s Summerwater is one of those novels that has drawn praise from professional critics on both the U.S. and the U.K. All that I knew about it going in was that it was short (201 numbered pages) and that it was supposed to have some kind of tragic/impactful/heartbreaking ending that kind of sneaks up on the reader. I can verify that the page-count is accurate, but the ending is more like getting blindsided by a freight train than having something surprise you by slowly sneaking up on you. And that makes this a tricky novel to review. One slip and the freight train is derailed before it even reaches the neighborhood.Summerwater is the story of a group of strangers who happen to be staying in a Scottish holiday camp during the same week, a week during which it seems mostly to be raining so often that the various families are largely confined to their cabins where they surreptitiously spy on each other through slatted windows. With one exception, everyone pretty much seems to be from either Scotland or England. The outsiders are from Eastern Europe - the others think - and depending on whom you ask that family is characterized as Bulgarian, Polish, Russian, or Romanian. Everyone is so certain that they know the family’s origin that no one makes an effort to verify any of the assumptions. They don’t speak to the foreigners at all, but for that matter, they barely speak to each other either.In what could pass for a collection of interconnected short stories as much as anything else, Moss introduces the families to the readers one at a time. Each “story,” of course has the same setting and sometimes the characters do have the kind of interaction that requires a little more from them than staring at, and wondering about, each other. The characters run the gamut from the elderly to toddlers, and their lives from contentment to despair. Some of what is going on behind closed doors is laugh-out-loud funny, and some of it will bring a tear to your eye. Moss truly is a good writer, and the structure works well. For the most part, her adult characters are witty and observant, if more than a little standoffish, such as one wife who is desperate for a little alone-time because all the rain. She thinks:“…setting aside the violent and deranged, getting married is like voting in that whatever you choose the outcome will be at best mildly unsatisfactory four years down the line.”My favorite chapter of them all is “Zanzibar,” a snippet during which Moss places the reader inside the minds of Josh and Millie, who are on the verge of marriage, during the sex act itself. The contrast between what each is thinking, as opposed to what each believes the other must be thinking and experiencing is hysterical at times. Let’s just say it is a very good thing that neither of them is a mindreader.But that freight train is still out there somewhere.Bottom Line: Summerwater is as enjoyable as it is memorable, but for entirely different reasons. However, the ending left me a bit confused because of something that is only hinted at about one of the characters. I’m still not sure exactly why what happens at the end actually happens; perhaps, that’s what Moss was going for, perhaps not. And, too, maybe I just missed something. It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened.

[modioperandi · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A beautiful cinematic series of vignettes centered around vacationers and locals in Scotland. The loch looms heavy, as does rain, and character sketches. Especially riveting is the opening of a woman running in the pouring rain and we the reader are inside her head. It's great. It's moody and funny and lyrical. Sarah Moss has in Summer-Water isolated the inner thoughts of everyday people from various backgrounds to build up a thoughtful novel-of-vignettes approach that I really love. The pacing is perfect with a build up of tension, like atmospheric pressure, building with each story and each section fits, dovetails, and collides with the next in the most natural way possible. By the end you will be going back in for a reread to see how Sarah Moss has done what she has with this masterful short novel.

[kidzdoc_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The events in this short novel take place in a long cul-de-sac in a chalet park adjacent to a loch in the Trossachs of Scotland on the longest day of the year, a day notable for unrelenting heavy rain. The focus is on several middle class English inhabitants of five of the cabins at its end, a retired elderly couple in one, and the others by people on holiday: a young couple nearing marriage, and three families of four, two with two young children, the other with two miserable teenagers whose out of touch parents cannot fathom why their kids are so unhappy. The sixth cabin holds a group of Eastern Europeans, who insist on hosting all night parties with extremely loud music that keep their neighbors awake and add both to the others' dislike of the foreigners, as well as the tension on a day when escape from one's own family members is difficult at best.The book's chapters consist of several characters' internal dialogue, as they worry about their family members and their own lives, which is even more magnified in their closed settings. Overriding everything is a heavy sense of foreboding in the reader, and as tensions build within each cabin it seems obvious that something bad will happen at the end of this day — but to whom? Summerwater is a well crafted novel that was compelling and filled with twists and turns that kept my attention from the first page to the last. Once again, Sarah Moss' superb ability to portray the lives and thoughts of everyday people makes for a very interesting book, and one that I would highly recommend, especially for anyone who is new to her writing.

[ozzer_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Feeling depressed by social distancing? Why not commiserate with a group of vacationers at a remote Scottish holiday park on a rainy day? Everyone is either isolated indoors where people understandably can get on each other’s nerves or getting wet and dreary out of doors. The only access to the wider world is through the Wi-Fi at the local pub. Moss expertly builds suspense in this setting by using multiple close third-person narratives interspersed with short nature vignettes. This approach artfully explores the unseen worlds of her characters along with that of the local wildlife.Moss’s characters are the clear strength of her novel. She treats them with sympathy, humor, and subtlety. They include young families, an elderly couple, newlyweds, rebellious teenagers, and rowdy immigrants. With the exception of the latter, Moss captures rich internal monologues from each about such diverse personal experiences as exercise (running and kayaking), age-related memory loss, sex, teenage rebellion, parenting, childhood worldview, ageing, class snobbery, prejudice, and politics.The arc of the novel covers one dark rainy day where most of the adults are relegated to observing their neighbors at a distance. The mood is dark and claustrophobic. One also sees multiple opportunities for disaster along the way, including an early morning run in the dark by a lone woman, a kayaking experience on the lough in a wild windstorm, one child daring another to swing over water on a rope, a mysterious observer in the woods, an ex-soldier living alone in a tent, and a loud late-night party. Of course, disaster finally does arrive, but not until the final chapter. One senses, however, that Moss is less interested in writing a thriller than in observing human nature.Suspense builds in each chapter yet dissipates due to the picaresque nature of the narrative. Each chapter is an impeccable standalone, only loosely related to the others. This gives the overall novel an unfortunate baggy feel. Notwithstanding this minor flaw, SUMMERWATER is indeed an engaging and thoughtful reading experience.

[pgchuis · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.This was a fairly quick read, set on an apocalyptically rainy day at a holiday park on a loch in Scotland. Different chapters were from the perspectives of a wide variety of characters staying in the park's lodges. The writing was beautiful and the characters extremely well-observed. There was very little plot (until the ending, which was fairly dramatic), but characters recurred on the periphery of other chapters, which linked the different sections. There were also short chapters which I think were about the nature of the loch - I am ashamed to say that I found the first few like very long very difficult to understand poems and after that I skipped them.That apart, highly recommended.

[nicx27 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I must confess this is my first Sarah Moss book and I wish that wasn't the case as I absolutely loved Summerwater. It's a very quick read, partly because it's only 200 pages (with lots packed into them) but also because I was very quickly embroiled in each of the characters' lives.Each section of the book focuses on one of a set of characters who are holidaying at a cabin park by a loch in Scotland. It sounds idyllic but it's constantly raining and there's nothing to do. The whole book is told over the course of one single day.Sarah Moss has a writing style that I thought very appealing and very observational. In telling the story from each character's viewpoint we see events quite differently each time. What I particularly liked was the way she writes much of it as an inner monologue and I completely identified with the way ever changing thoughts flitted through their minds portraying their very humanness. I really enjoyed the setting too. It's inspired. There's something about the idea of the cabin park, being placed close to strangers in structures that give the impression of being a bit flimsy, that gives a sense of vulnerability and I felt like there was something lying beneath the surface throughout, a kind of foreboding.I honestly could have carried on reading about these people but Moss had to wind it up at some point and it wasn't how I was expecting. This is a superb read which felt so original. The wry humour had me smiling from the off and the beautiful writing had me marvelling at its depths.

[arewenotben · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent again from Sarah Moss; a tight, beautifully written story set in a wet Scottish holiday camp. Structured almost as a collection of short stories with each chapter being written from a different character's perspective in a loosely stream of consciousness style, ranging from young children to pensioners. Summerwater seems to cram a large amount into it's short page count, it also has some of the best writing on the act of running since Murakami.

[boredgames · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

a masterclass of a roving point of view, though i am not sure how memorable this will be