The Inland Sea

Recently graduated and unsure of her future, the narrator spends a turbulent Sydney year working shifts at an emergency call centre, connecting callers in fires and floods across the country to the services they need. Her private life is in crisis as well. She drinks too much, goes home with strangers, wanders the city in the small hours and keeps going back to a former lover who treats her badly. Recollections of her furious father and her parents' break-up surface, and she reads the journals of her forebear John Oxley, the nineteenth-century explorer who went looking for a sea he believed lay at the heart of Australia. Restless and without direction, she begins to think of leaving, while environmental and personal disaster draw closer together.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

256 pages in the original

Genres

Coming of age, Nature (assigned by AI)

Set in

Australia

First published

2020

ISBN

9781911590354 (Pushkin Press, United Kingdom)

9781646220175 (Catapult, United States)

9781911590255 (Pushkin Press, United Kingdom)