The Dangerous Undertow of 'The Inland Sea' Charted in Debut Novel by Alumna Madeleine Watts ’19

As if nature were mirroring her own erratic life, the unnamed narrator of The Inland Sea by alumna Madeleine Watts ‘19 careens headlong into a spree of self-destructive behavior in her native Australia surrounded by an eerie ecological nightmare of brush fires, flooding, and suffocating heat.

A hallucinatory dystopian vision, the book was hailed by the Irish Times as a “gripping debut,” while the Financial Times called the book “resplendent” and “compelling,” with prose “that crackles with electricity in the same way the world she’s writing about prickles with danger.”

The Inland Sea takes its title from the quixotic journey of early 19th century British explorer John Oxley into uncharted central Australia in search of this mythic body of water, which turned out to be a mirage in inhospitable desert, albeit one that lured many to their deaths over the years.

The heroine, the great-great-great-great granddaughter of Oxley’s, is a recent college grad and aspiring writer working at an emergency call center, where she fields nationwide calls dealing with disaster—human catastrophe backgrounded by a contagion of climate disasters.

Her ancestor’s dangerous quest into the desert outback echoes her own dark rite of passage of drinking binges, promiscuous sex, and violence, a year of living dangerously that culminates in departing Australia for a new life. 

Watts wrote this book some years back but it seems eerily prescient in light of the recent brushfire conflagration in Australia. As the Financial Times elaborated in their review: “The author implores us to look, listen and start admitting what’s out there: emergencies that will find us, even as we are trying hardest to escape them.”

Currently residing in New York, Watts is the author of the prize-winning novella, Afraid of Walking (2013), and is a freelance journalist for numerous publications, Including The Believer, Vox, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.