Water

by John Boyne

Doubleday

Award-winning Irish author, John Boyne, best known originally for The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (the biggest selling novel by an Irish writer since records began), and then more recently The Heart’s Invisible Furies and Echo Chamber amongst wonderful others, is launching a quartet of interlinked novellas based on the elements which will focus on sexual abuse from four different perspectives.  Water has just been released.  Earth is due out mid-year. Air and Fire will be out in 2025.  Not one to shy away from traumatic experiences or avoid searing questions, John Boyne will have you gripped by his Elements Quartet, starting with Water:

The first thing Vanessa Carvin does when she arrives on the island is change her name. To the locals, she is Willow Hale, a solitary outsider escaping Dublin to live a hermetic existence in a small cottage, not a notorious woman on the run from her past. But scandals follow and she has some questions of her own to answer. If her ex-husband is really the monster everyone says he is, then how complicit was she in his crimes?

These are four individual stories with four very different narrators, all of whom have either been involved in, complicit with, or found themselves the victims of trauma, and whose experiences have been affected by the elements that give each book its title. And while each can be read as a standalone book, their characters intersect and overlap, their experiences informing the lives of each other. 

‘A perceptive, moving exploration of guilt, grief and complicity’ – Sunday Express

‘Boyne does not put a foot wrong in this masterly novella’ – Mail on Sunday

‘An intriguing investigation of contemporary trauma… [a] short but powerful book’ – Guardian