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Long Wave
  • Published: 2 July 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529904499
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $34.99

Long Wave

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
7 July 2026
Hardback
2 Aug 2026
EBook
2 July 2026
Audiobook
2 July 2026
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A hypnotic and haunting novel of motherhood, loss, and the invisible ties that bind us together, from Booker Prize-shortlisted Daisy Johnson

A hypnotic and haunting work of fiction about losing yourself and finding your family, Long Wave is the finest novel yet from Booker Prize-shortlisted Daisy Johnson

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 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.

Told with mythic power and lyrical precision, Long Wave is an extraordinary novel of longing and loss, rebirth and survival.
  • Published: 2 July 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529904499
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $34.99
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About the author

Daisy Johnson

Daisy Johnson was born in 1990. Her debut short-story collection, Fen, was published in 2016. In 2018 she became the youngest author ever to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize with her debut novel, Everything Under. Her 2020 novel Sisters was adapted into the 2024 feature film September Says. She is the winner of the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize, A. M. Heath Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her debut play, Viola’s Room, was produced in 2024 by the immersive theatre company Punchdrunk. She currently lives in Oxford by the river.
portrait photo of Daisy Johnson

Also by Daisy Johnson

The Hotel
Sisters
Everything Under
Fen
See all

Praise for Long Wave

The power of Johnson's storytelling is elemental, fundamental, irresistible. Long Wave has the gravity of an epic and is her greatest achievement yet: a gripping mystery, a series of impeccable character portraits, and an unflinchingly observed treatise on the maelstrom of motherhood. Masterful

Kiran Millwood Hargrave

An astonishingly beautiful novel with an unearthly sirenic power that remains grounded in the knotty, ambivalent and profound relationships between its characters – mothers, daughters, lovers, the lost. Long Wave is a triumph

Kaliane Bradley

In Long Wave, Daisy Johnson explores caregiving and failures of caregiving. Looping through many years and many lives, this book is at once quiet and intense, at once devastating and heartening. I was carried by Johnson’s potent prose, and I was moved by these intersecting perspectives

Helen Phillips

I was gripped by this haunting story of mothers and children pushed right to the edges. Daisy Johnson’s world feels painfully real, and yet bristles with magic

Becky Barnicoat
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