Emma recommends... Long Wave - Daisy Johnson

We're excited to be welcoming Daisy Johnson to Collected to discuss Long Wave on Friday 14 August, 7.30pm. Get your tickets for the event here.

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Emma says... I already knew Daisy Johnson was pretty special (I will literally NEVER forget where I was when I finished reading Everything Under) but this book has absolutely confirmed that she is. Packed with gorgeously poetic and yet highly specific language, vivid imagery and characterisation - Johnson's ability to pin down seemingly amorphous, indescribable experience is astounding. At the same time, Long Wave is a very grounded story of precarity, of those who live on the margins, of adoptive family. A deeply affecting exploration of how the inevitable consequence of love is the fear of separation, Long Wave is sublime and I can feel it firmly lodged in my heart and my mind.

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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.