Scottish writer Thomas McMullan’s Groundwater is a fine-tuned depiction of domestic life, except with its unmooring fairy tale elements. John, an out-of-work translator and Liz, a conservation charity worker, have left the city of London during Covid pandemic behind to move to a nameless wilderness remote house on the shores of the lake, after John receives an unexpected endowment from his former neighbour, who has “died on ventilator”.  They hope that “altered by their new surroundings”, they can start a family. Though the house is barely unpacked, Liz’s sister, Monica, who already had two children and her husband, have come to visit for the August bank holiday weekend. Over the course of a hot, slow weekend, tensions simmer, things go unsaid- between the two couples, between the two sisters. Monica uses her motherhood to taunt Liz, when she and her family descend on the couple’s new home as soon as lockdown restrictions lift. Their time together is punctured by visits from Him, the solitary local warden for the area; quasi-phantasmic strangers, and a trio of student anarchists camping nearby draw closer and closer, finally infiltrating the house- and bringing their own tensions and hierarchies with them.

Their new residence proves to be no idyll. This narrative alternatives between John and Liz’s minutely detailed day-to-day and surreal dream (or nightmare) sequences from each of their perspectives, in which the couple dredge up portentous objects from the nearby lake.

Nature, rather than offering sanctuary, rattles them with omens, a fawn perishing at the threshold of their home, a black dog creeping into their hallway to die. John discovers the faint, spectral outline of another couple- perhaps pervious inhabitants on the walls.

Their very act of buying the house saddles John and Liz with guilt: It’s “the same price as a flat in London, they assure others, but John suspects that, in a national housing crisis, the purchase makes them “part of the problem”. 

As the weekend draws to a close, the landscape reveals a violence that has long lain hidden-and the summer builds to its harrowing climax. 

Groundwater is about the gulfs that lies between us and those we love- and the miraculous way our deepest desires and fears manifest.

Housing crisis, eco-anxiety and the choice to have children in a precarious world, featuring a disparate cast of characters who converge around a married couple in their thirties.  

Groundwater is a portrait not only of a couple in crisis, but of a world on the verge of disaster. 

Groundwater by Thomas McMullan, Bloomsbury £18.99, 304 pages.