Crackling with the tension of a thriller, Mother Waters is a deeply beautiful and strange debut about ambition, grief, love and the myths we weave – both about ourselves and the natural world – by a hauntingly powerful new voice.

On the morning of her wedding anniversary, Charlie walks out of her house and her marriage. Free for the first time in years, she returns to her love of marine biology, determined to regain her professional standing.

Charlie specialises in bioacoustics, listening to the private orchestras of the ocean: the songs of whales, the clack of parrotfish munching through kelp, the zither of crustaceans hauling themselves across the seabed. The sound she yearns to hear the most, though, is the voice of her father, who died at sea when she was a child.

When Dexter, the son of a billionaire, uses his ailing father’s fortune to fund a research vessel to explore one of the world’s deepest ocean trenches, Charlie seizes the chance to immerse herself in the oceanic world and discover what happened to her father.

While Charlie and Dexter each seek to reconcile their fathers’ legacies, something is waiting for them below the surface of the ocean…

Praise for Mother Waters:

“I gasped reading this work: its breathtaking attention to the underwater world, those unfathomable depths. It’s stunning writing, and not just of the ocean. This work gives the same attention to the messy process of living. In Nan Joo’s hands human relationships become mythic, epic and as unsettling as a haunting voice from the deep.” - Romy Ash, author of Mantle

“A hauntingly strange and uncannily beautiful exploration of darkness, light and the possibility of transformation.’ - James Bradley, author of Deep Water, Ghost Species and Clade

“Lisa Nan Joo’s debut, Mother Waters, is an atmospheric, quietly unsettling novel that explores ambition, grief, inheritance and the emotional legacies left by fathers. It shifts between thriller and literary fiction, with speculative elements that make it a compelling read.” - Emma Pei Yin for Books+Publishing