In 2018, Daisy Johnson became the youngest writer ever shortlisted for the Booker Prize with her debut novel Everything Under, a gender-fluid reimagining of the Oedipus myth set among canal boat communities. Her short-story collection Fen, blending the uncanny with the mundane, earned critical acclaim. She later wrote Sisters, a psychological horror exploring sibling bonds and grief, and The Hotel, a series of chilling ghost stories. Now, Long Wave arrives, sharing hallmarks of her earlier work but surpassing them in subtlety and depth—perhaps her strongest novel yet.
A Tale of Three Generations
Long Wave follows three generations of mothers. As a child, Ori was found abandoned on a wild, uninhabited island off the coast of England. Her mother, Ruth, had fled there with her for reasons that remain mysterious. Ori was later adopted by a scientist specializing in hares. As an adult, newly postpartum and struggling, Ori is haunted by questions about her past.
Ruth, Ori's mother, witnessed at age 10 what appeared to be a mother and baby drowning in a nearby river—yet police found no trace of them. Ruth's own mother, Edith, locked her away out of shame for a pregnancy out of wedlock. These tangled relationships can be confusing initially, but readers who embrace the uncertainty are richly rewarded.
Vivid Imagery and Grounded Truth
Johnson's talent lies in combining poetic, myth-like imagery with unflinching realism. Here we find “mountain hares with thick white coats who have never seen a human even in their dreams,” a semi-derelict lighthouse behind a forest of thorns, and a child bashing stones to guide her mother back. Yet she juxtaposes this with pavements “sticky with Calippo and crushed cigarettes” and blue NHS hospital curtains, “the rattle of the trolley on the linoleum.” The effect is sublime.
Her language around early motherhood is especially striking. “The tiredness is like a suffocating, papery snow,” she writes, capturing the exhaustion precisely. She describes the fontanelle with its “immediacy of aliveness,” a baby's mouth moving in dreams of milk, and the sensation of breastfeeding: “she has the enormous sense that he is drinking all of her.”
Emotional Depth and Surrogate Families
Johnson has long explored those living on the margins. Here, she examines surrogate and adoptive families alongside the three central mothers. Ruth and her former colleague JP attempt to form a communal household where women share childcare: “We need some funding, right? Like some funding we could apply for, like arts council funding but the project is raising some children and not doing it wrong and not going completely insane and killing everyone.”
The emotional scaffolding of her characters feels more robust than in previous works, with less reliance on supernatural elements. Ori's “ghostly, forgotten family [are] like intruders somewhere in the back of the house,” but the novel's power comes from its raw human truth.
Stunning Command of Language
Johnson's prose is simply stunning. Describing a swing, she writes: “In the space between the top and the bottom of the swing there is elastic time, slowed to a drip. Her feet brush the trees opposite, her head when she tips it over the apex of her spine scrapes a line from purple sky down into the ground. She is in the ground. She is up in the air, lifting from the seat.”
She conveys noise sensitivity from a neurodivergent boy's perspective with fresh inventiveness: “The blasting burp of traffic surging and jamming and beeping lights and beeping reversing and the clack and click and stamp of shoes and doors slamming dogs yap yap yapping at cars cats yowling at dawn jangle of chains on the playground swings moving whump of heavy bags thrown onto the floor the derisive call of the birds and everywhere everywhere everywhere the yammer and hassle and blunt object of human chatter.”
A Deeper Examination of Love and Loss
How the plot resolves is almost beside the point. Johnson prioritizes character and language over gimmick or twist. Though never mentioned, Gaza and the tragic separation of mothers and babies through death or disappearance haunts the novel. Written during a time of news filled with families searching rubble, some of that desperation is distilled into its prose. The mysterious “drowning” Ruth saw—premonition, collective maternal unconscious, or glitch in time—is never fully explained, but we have an inkling. Johnson goes deeper than before in examining love, fear, and separation, creating a work that endures long after the book is closed.
Long Wave is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99).
