A sinister thriller that grabs you from its very beginning, This is the Water is both chilling and unputdownable. A killer is swimming in a public pool and carefully observing his possible future victims while in the stands a mother follows her children's race team. Told by an unnamed but unsettling narrator, their tales soon intersect with dazzling results. Fable-like and poetic but totally entrancing this a book that will possibly divide people but I was completely sold on its premise and possibly unreliable narration. On one hand, you have a delicately engineered mystery with a powerful sense of dread and the unfolding inevitable while underneath lurks a disturbing world of uncertainty and mystery. Make your own mind up.
There is a style to this novel that takes a bit of getting used to. The title is the clue; This is the water, so the rest of the tale is reported thus: This is you, Annie; This is the killer; This is … and so on. An interesting rendering for a tense thriller with the killer identified early on and you too frightened to reveal him until … Well, it’s certainly different and works well.
This is a novel about a woman. About a mother. About a marriage. About a murder. In the brightly lit public pool the killer swims and watches. Amongst the mothers cheering on their swim team daughters is Annie. Watching her two girls race, she's thinking of other things. Her husband's emotional distance. Her lost brother. The man she's drawn to. Then she learns a terrible secret. Now her everyday cares and concerns seem meaningless. Annie knows she has to act. Above all, she must protect her children.
Yannick Murphy, while being one of our most daring and original writers, is first and foremost an exquisitely attuned observer of human behaviour - Dave Eggers
Magical and harrowing - Publishers Weekly (on HERE THEY COME)
A wonderful novel. Original, suspenseful, funny and profoundly moving... I plan to recommend it to everyone I know - Geraldine Brooks (on THE CALL)
Author
About Yannick Murphy
Born and raised in New York, Yannick Murphy has an MA from New York University. She is the author of several novels for adults as well as short story collections and books for children. Her writing has won many prestigious awards, and she has talked about her work on radio, television and in person across the USA and Canada. She lives in Vermont. You can visit her website at www.yannickmurphy.com.
