During her free time, she gets black-out drunk, hooks up with strangers, and navigates an affair with an ex-lover whose girlfriend is in their circle of friends.

And yet the stress of listening to far-off disasters seeps into her personal life, and she begins walking home with keys in hand, ready to fight off men disappointed by what they find in neighboring bars. The work becomes monotonous: answer, transfer, repeat. Callers report car accidents and violent spouses and homes caught up in flame. Over the course of an eight-hour shift, she is dropped into hundreds of crises, hearing only pieces of each. The Inland Sea is her first novel.A young Australian woman unable to find her footing in the world begins to break down when the emergencies she hears working as a 911 operator and the troubles within her own life gradually blur together, forcing her to grapple with how the past has shaped her present.ĭrifting after her final year in college, a young writer begins working part-time as an emergency dispatch operator in Sydney. Her novella, Afraid of Waking It, was awarded the 2015 Griffith Review Novella Prize.

Her essays have appeared in The Believer and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, and her fiction has been published in The White Review and The Lifted Brow. Madeleine Watts grew up in Sydney, Australia and has lived in New York since 2013. Desperate and adrift, she yearns for change.īuilding to a tightly controlled bushfire of ecological and personal crisis, The Inland Sea is a fierce and beautiful novel about the search for refuge in a state of emergency. Her personal life is buckling under her self-destructive obsessions - she drinks heaily, sleeps with strangers, wanders the streets of Sydney at night, and pursues a disastrous affair with an ex-lover. She works as an emergency dispatch operator, trapped in constant crisis as fires and floods rage across Australia. A fierce and beautiful novel about coming of age in a dying worldĪs she faces the open wilderness of adulthood, our narrator finds that the world around her is coming undone.

Madeleine watts the inland sea