The Watermark

by Sam Mills

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Pub Date Feb 11 2025 | Archive Date Feb 17 2025

Melville House Publishing | Melville House

Historical Fiction | Literary Fiction | Sci Fi & Fantasy

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Description

A quirky, literary love story like no other, one that veers wildly from contemporary Britain to Soviet Russia to a bizarre but recognizable future, from one of the UK’s hottest young novelists...

Rachel and Jaime: their story isn’t simple. It might not even be their story.

Augustus Fate, a once-lauded novelist and now renowned recluse, is struggling with his latest creation. But when Jaime and Rachel stumble into his remote cottage, he spies opportunity, imprisoning them inside his novel-in-progress. Now, the fledgling couple must try to find their way back home through a labyrinthine network of novels.

And as they move from Victorian Oxford to a utopian Manchester, a harsh Russian winter to an AI-dominated near-future, so too does the narrative of their relationship change time and again.

Together, they must figure out if this relationship of so many presents can have any future at all.

The Watermark is a heart-stopping exploration of the narratives we cling to in the course of a life, and the tendency of the world to unravel them. Kaleidoscopic and wildly imaginative, it asks: how can we truly be ourselves, when Fate is pulling the strings?

Advance Praise

"Mills’ kaleidoscopic novel, like her earlier work The Quiddity of Will Self (2012), is an imaginative tour-de-force, one that never collapses under the weight of its hugely ambitious structure. In a breathtaking, captivating page-turner full of surprises and gloriously inventive narrative devices, Mills deftly demonstrates how enormously entertaining metafictional novels can be." —Booklist, STARRED review

"Inception meets Stranger than Fiction.... [Mills'] fluid command of each vastly different genre serves to highlight what stays the same in each—the strengths, faults, and deep bond of Rachel and Jaime. Readers will be impressed." —Publishers Weekly

"This time-hopping meta-fiction has the madcap energy of a Philip K. Dick story ... Mills's protagonists treat their absurd bind with absolute seriousness. Farce on the outside, tragedy within." —The Times (London)

"If you are a fan of geeky, metafictional gameplay -- and really, why wouldn't you be — then Mills's dazzlingly inventive genre-hopping caper will keep you pleasurably on your toes ... a reckless disquisition on the reality-distorting consolations of fiction and story-telling ... Mills's vaulting ambition delivers huge brain-addling rewards." —Daily Mail