Thank you to Pan Macmillan / Picador and NetGalley for the ePub copy of Summerwater, by .

Set on the longest day of the summer, Summerwater is a little different from Moss' previous books, Twelve people are cooped up with their families in a faded Scottish holiday park. In chapters of stream-of-conciousness writing each character ponders their circumstances. The author makes the reader wait until the very end before building up to a disaster that somehow is expected to occur all along. In not revealing if there are any fatalities Moss concludes her short novel with deliberate ambiguity. Worth reading for fans of Sarah Moss' previous output and writing style.

I've loved some of Moss' past books but this brief fable of a story feels distinctly underpowered. It seems to me to show how a disparate group of strangers become a quasi-community when something disastrous happens, but about 90% of the time we're rather aimlessly in the self-absorbed heads of various characters. The voices of these inner monologues are too same-y and, by their very nature, mundane. Is this a response to how, even in our divisive times, people can and do come together? Too little, too late, I'm afraid, for this reader.

4.5 rounded up

I've been a big fan of all the Sarah Moss books I've read, but this one is definitely up there with [book:The Tidal Zone|30325865] as one of her best. <i>Summerwater</i> is a taut, and at times claustrophobic novella chronicling a day at a holiday resort in rural Scotland. The day is rainy, torrentially so, confining most of the holiday-goers to their cabins, providing the perfect environment for them all to watch each other and get on each other's nerves. Tensions rise throughout the day, culminating in a tragedy.

As in <i>The Tidal Zone</i> I found Moss's observations of human nature spot-on, and these were what really made this such a great read. The narrative is written through the internal monologues of the various characters, and there wasn't a weak character among them - from the moody teenager kayaking in the downpour to escape his irritating family to the fitness-obsessed mum trying to get away from her insufferable husband.

I have no doubt this will be a roaring success when published, akin to [book:Ghost Wall|38922230]. Very highly recommended!

<i>Thank you Netgalley and Pan Macmillan for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.</i>

A one day novel, set in a claustrophobic Scottish holiday park on a very wet day, was oddly exactly what I needed to read during this weird time of being indefinitely confined to home. Summerwater has similar feelings of isolation to Moss’s incredibly good and successful Ghost Wall, and I’m sure this novel will do just as well. The real mastery of Summerwater is how Moss handles multiple third person narratives, including writing from the perspective of young children, ensuring that the reader knows exactly who the focus is on at any given time, which is no easy task. I flew through this short novel and I can see it being really well received when it’s published later this year.

Summerwater is set in a Scottish cabin park in the Trossachs (a stunningly beautiful part of the world) and takes place over a single day. The day is marked by the continuous torrential rain that falls (I have holidayed in Scotland many times: this happens).

The nature of a cabin park means that it puts different groups of people, who would never normally meet, into a temporary community. Summerwatch takes this transient community and presents us with a series of chapters each of which focuses on a character from one of the cabins. Many of the chapters form a natural pairing as they take two characters from a single cabin (wife and husband, brother and sister, boyfriend and girlfriend). There is a wide spread in the ages of the characters, so we get several different viewpoints. One of the key things that quickly becomes apparent is that the characters are self-absorbed: they notice some of the things happening in other cabins, but they take no interest in them and there seems to be very little, if any, communication between the different family groups. This introspective view from each character seems to be key to the underlying themes in the book, but for me it lead to some storylines becoming repetitive and somewhat dull. This is a matter of personal taste and I know many other readers will find the stories absorbing.

The idea of the different families’ isolation from one another is extended to become active mistrust of noisy Ukrainian family who disturb the site with their loud music and a lone ex-soldier who, exactly the opposite to the Ukrainians, never makes a sound but is viewed suspiciously.

Interspersed among these short stories is a thread of nature notes. There are reflections on the nature of bedrock, a deer and her fawn stepping out of the wood with an inbuilt fear of predators, a peregrine falcon prevented from hunting by the rain and several others. These very short pieces hint at an upcoming tragedy (indeed, one ends with the words “there will be deaths before morning” which immediately put the reader on alert - will there?).

There’s a dramatic climax to the book which has been sort of hinted at but which felt to me as though it came rather suddenly.

I think your view of this book will hugely depend on how you react to the writing. For me, I found several of the individual stories became a bit tedious, but others will find them absorbing, I am sure. And I found the ending rather rushed. I think it’s an interesting book on reflection, but the actual reading of it didn’t engage me.

The book is set on a single Summer day in a Scottish cabin park occupied by a number of otherwise unconnected families (some owners of the cabins, most borrowing from families or friends). On the day in question the relentless rain of the previous days has continued.

The story is told in a series of third party point of view chapters – with narrators largely matched in pairs (husband and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend, siblings) and ranging in age from a young child listening to nighttime noises and shadows to a retired lady with early-stage dementia (wife of a retired anti-English bigoted Scottish doctor), searching for words and objects that escape her. These chapters at either end of the spectrum are ambitious in what they try to voice and perhaps not entirely successful.

The chapters are mainly in an internal loosely stream-of-consciousness style which I think fits one of the themes of the novel – with each character (even those in the same family) pre-occupied with their own thoughts and concerns (either immediate or longer term), despite their communal situation.

Some of the chapters are particularly internally focused and repetitive: a young mother who wakes early and goes for a long, almost obsessive, run into the hills; a girl suffering more than enjoying her boyfriend’s attempts to induce simultaneous orgasms; a sixteen year old boy on a kayaking adventure that turns out to be far harder than he had expected; a teenage girl musing on suicidal thoughts; the Mum of two toddlers trying and failing to enjoy a brief respite of me-time.

The problem for me was that it means that the chapters, even though objectively short, appear subjectively far too long.

One thing that brings the disparate families together, other than their despair at the duration of the downpour, is distrust of two outside groups: a solitary ex-solider in a nearby tent and a Ukrainian family who, each side of the day, play loud music into the night with a group of friends. A distrust which ranks from ignorant hostility (the racist husband of the runner in his story calls them interchangeably– Bulgarian/Polish/Romanian) to unpleasant intervention (a chapter by a rather psychopathic teenager).

Threaded through the chapters are a series of natural vignettes (rain, the bedrock, the sky and the Transatlantic airlines passing overhead, a deer, a loch bed and its sunken aancient coracles, a peregrine, an anthill, a vixen, bats, trees) which to some extent I think exist to evoke a feeling of timelessness and of nature continuing of human concern, but on the other to show how many of these have their own concerns for food, shelter, the avoidance of dangerous predators, the exclusion of outsiders). There are also portentous links to the main story “There will be deaths by morning” and the first vignette ends the same way “You would notice soon enough, if it stopped” as the book.

And the deceptively slow-moving book meets a dramatic climax.

Overall I felt that the concept underlying the book was better than either its realisation (I struggled to see what lesson I should take – that actually be making peace with outsiders and sharing experiences is to invite disaster, only to be rescued by a paramilitary intervention) or its execution (as commented above too many of the PoV chapters end up rather tedious and the ending is a little rushed and unnecessary).

My thanks to Pan Macmillan for an ARC via NetGalley.

Summerwater by Sarah Moss was one of the novels I most looked forward to reading in 2020 and it did not disappoint. Over the course of a day on a Scottish lochside cabin park, Moss builds a very real sense of the precarious in the minutiae of the separate yet shared lives of her characters. Edinburgh's constant rain outside my window made the suspenseful prose - centred in the bleak and beautiful landscape - even more atmospheric. There are nods to Brexit Britain in the attitudes of some of the book's characters that make it ever more relevant to the politics of today. As I'm reading this in isolation from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the following line was incredibly prescient: "How would they know if there's some mass-extinction event in progress, how's that supposed to work with no phones?" Overall, Summerwater is a short, sharp and exquisitely crafted novel.

I have been on this holiday, the one in Summerwater. The cabin isn't as advertised. The weather is unseasonably bad. The neighbours are all kinds of awful. Not only that, it's cost more than going abroad, but we felt virtuous about getting back to nature, even if it took nine hours to get there. Sarah Moss brilliantly captures the lack of community in a Scottish Highlands forest park where things were so much nicer in times gone by. Flashes of anger and poor communication permeate the narrative, and there is the same sense of impending dread from her last novel, Ghost Wall. This is, like Ghost Wall, a Brexit novel, and isnt aceaid to explore xenophobia and toxic attitudes. It is brilliantly claustrophobic and very honest.

In her previous novel, Ghost Wall, Sarah Moss set her dark and disturbing tale, of how distortion of the past can corrupt the present, in Northumberland.

In Summerwater the location has been moved northwards to a wooden lodge holiday park in the Trossachs. In truth it has probably seen better days and although Summer, the rain pours down. Boredom and discontent abound.

The novel is set during a period of one day here and relates to the actions and activities of those staying there. Starting with Justine on her 5 a.m. run and ending with a late night party.

The holiday park dwellers are a microcosm of society, in age, class, gender and ethnicity. All the divisions, resentments, feuds and hopes are to be found.

Behind the looking out of the windows at others, there is a sense of unease and discontentment. Many vow never to return.

The reader senses that something will happen, something perhaps dramatic.

Sarah Moss' works are not long, but feel fresh and almost experimental. They have an authencity and a desire to go under the surface about them.

A stimulating and thoughtful read.

Thank you, NetGalley, for letting me read this book.

This book blew me away. It's set in a holiday park on a loch in Scotland. It's that holiday we all remember - the cabins are a bit shittier than expected, and it rains incessantly. We get to view the events of a couple of days from the perspective of different people around the site - the mum who runs, the retired GP, the teenage boy, the little girl, the young couple - and that gives us insight into their lives, their relationships, and the secret fears and dreams they don't share with anybody else, even those closest to them.

Moss builds up great atmospheres. There's something bad, something scary, just out of sight. There's something coming, it's just a question of what.

This is a very skillful book, cleverly written, using the inner monologue in a really engaging and perceptive way. I'm going to explore her previous books now.