SUMMERWATER

A multivoiced narrative set in the Scottish Highlands, this broodingly suspenseful and engagingly intimate novel is a miniature portrait of family life in various forms, of old age and childhood, framed by wild nature, which becomes a character in itself.

“The sky is lying on the loch,” this meditative novel begins. And summer rain does indeed fall ceaselessly and torrentially on the Scottish lakeside retreat where a handful of vacationing families, each renting a cabin, become erstwhile and wary neighbors. Just a “huddle of chalets,” as one bored woman remarks, with “eyes at every window.” Most are English, some are Scottish, and one family—of nighttime noisemakers—is Romanian. The Scots resent the English (“they could stay in England with…their nasty little government”), and everyone disapproves of the Romanians (“You’re supposed to have left, you know, people like you,” one child taunts another). Each protagonist also battles the weather—the mother on her dawn run, the teenager kayaking too far in choppy water, the child on the perilous swing that dangles over the loch, the old man walking—which proves an escape from family tedium but may also harbor a hidden menace. “The sky has turned a yellowish shade of grey,” we are told. “Small creatures in their burrows nose the air and stay hungry. There will be deaths by morning.” With consummate skill, the author reveals the inner lives of a handful of characters, their meditations by turns intensely moving and laconically humorous (married sex, a middle-aged wife reflects, is “like oiling your bike chain, doesn’t have to be fun but it stops things falling apart”) while conjuring up both landscape and atmosphere with lyrical delicacy. The novel that began at dawn ends at nightfall with a satisfying though awful denouement that steers clear of melodrama.

A psychologically acute depiction of modern Britain through the lens of one rainy summer day.