Daisy Johnson LONG WAVE with Sarvat Hasin

Daisy Johnson, author of the Booker Prize shortlisted 'Everything Under' returns with a novel about longing, mother and freedom.
About this Event

Long Wave

Close to the shore is the island: uninhabited, wild, with only a storm-beaten lighthouse for shelter. Ori was found there as a small child with a handful of stones, no memories and no mother. When she has a baby of her own, the job of motherhood feels immense and sleepless nights begin to shatter her grip on reality. Her head fills with the sound of stones knocking against each other and the mystery of her past begins to unravel, opening up a path to the mother she lost, and the mother she could become.
Years earlier, on a sweltering summer day, ten-year-old Ruth sees a woman and her baby walk into the river and disappear. But she is the only witness, and the water yields no trace. Ruth's mother, Edith, locks her daughter away - first to restrain these wild imaginings, and later, when she falls pregnant, to hide the shame. Ruth longs to escape and dreams of the nearby island, where she and her baby can finally be free.

Daisy Johnson

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.

Sarvat Hasin

Sarvat Hasin is a novelist and dramaturg from Pakistan. She has a masters in creative writing from the University of Oxford. Her first novel, This Wide Night, was published by Penguin India and longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Her second book You Can’t Go Home Again was published in 2018 and featured in Vogue India‘s and The Hindu‘s best of the year lists. Her third novel The Giant Dark (Dialogue Books, Hachette UK) was a runaway critical success, won the Mo Siewcharran Prize, and was shortlisted for the RSL Encore Award. Strange Girls is her US debut.