REVIEW
BOOK OF THE DAY

Long Wave By Daisy Johnson review – a sublime novel of motherhood and loss

Covering three generations, this tangled story of secrets, childhood, abandonment and care might be her best work yet

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

Thursday 2 July 2026

In 2018 Daisy Johnson was the youngest writer ever to be shortlisted for the Booker prize, for her debut novel Everything Under, a gender-fluid reimagining of the Oedipus myth involving canal boat communities and their complex family dynamics, plus a strange monster lurking in the depths. Before that, her short‑story collection Fen, with its blend of the uncanny and the workaday, was critically acclaimed. She has Written Sisters, a psychological horror that uses supernatural elements to explore sibling bonds and grief, and The Hotel,  series of seriously chilling interlinked ghost stories. Now comes Long Wave, which, while it shares some of these hallmarks, is in many ways finer and more subtle: perhaps her strongest work yet.

 

Saba Sams

BOOK OF THE DAY

Review

Gunk by Saba Sams review – boozy nights and baby love

This article is more than 8 months old

The Send Nudes author’s follow-up conveys a profound message about the insufficiency of the nuclear family

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

Fri 9 May 2025

To be selected for Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists list two years before your debut novel comes out must bring a certain amount of pressure. Saba Sams had already been named a rising star for her short-story collection, Send Nudes; one of the stories, Blue 4eva, won the 2022 BBC National short story award. Now comes Gunk, titled for the grotty student nightclub managed by the thirtysomething protagonist, Jules. The fried egg on the cover hints at a sleazy edge: expect hangover breakfasts with a dawn chorus soundtrack. It’s also a playful nod to more tender themes of fertility panic, unplanned pregnancy and young motherhood.

‘We are made of words’ / The radically intimate writing of Annie Ernaux

Annie Ernaux

‘We are made of words’: the radically intimate writing of Annie Ernaux

She offers us her own life, her own pain, without shame – and gives voice to the silences of women. For this the Nobel prizewinner deserves to be celebrated

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

Friday  7 October 2022

‘These things happened to me so that I might recount them,” Annie Ernaux writes in Happening, her slim retelling of the clandestine abortion she had in the 1960s, when the procedure was still illegal in France. “Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing. In other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”

‘I don’t believe in book snobbery’ … Sophie Mackintosh.
Photograph: Sophie Davidson

The first book interview

Sophie Mackintosh: 'Dystopian feminism might be a trend, but it’s also our lives'

The Water Cure’s author says she has not written a new Handmaid’s Tale, but it would be hard for any story centred on women’s lives not to be feminist

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

Thu 24 May 2018

“T

he novel is set in the future but it could be now, it’s not a million miles away,” Sophie Mackintosh tells me, in her soft Welsh lilt, sitting in an east London cafe. “Sometimes you scroll through Twitter and there is a horrible story like the Belfast rape case. You see a lot of really upsetting stories. That can throw off your whole day. You get angry, and that can make you feel sick. So I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch to imagine a world where you get ill from patriarchy.” She laughs, with irony.