Metronome

Shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award
Longlisted for the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award

'Unputdownable … An extraordinary book … as insightful and as premonitory as Orwell's 1984' Litro

'With echoes of Emily St John Mandel and Megan Hunter' Elizabeth Macneal

'Stylish and thoughtful … The eerie claustrophobia of the setting will stay with the reader for a long while.' Literary Review

Not all that is hidden is lost…

For twelve years Aina and Whitney have been in exile on an island for a crime they committed together, tethered to a croft by pills they take for survival every eight hours. They've kept busy - Aina with her garden, her jigsaw, her music; Whitney with his sculptures and maps - but something is not right.

Shipwrecks have begun washing up, supply drops have stopped and on the day their punishment is meant to end, the Warden does not come. Instead a sheep appears; but sheep can't swim.

Aina becomes convinced that they've been abandoned, and that Whitney has been keeping secrets. As she starts testing the limits of their prison, investigating ways she might escape, she is confronted by decisions that haunt her past. Little does she realise that her biggest choice is yet to come…

'Taut, unsettling and so completely charged with both tension and emotion' Naomi Ishiguro

'As moving as it is chilling' Emma Stonex

About the Author

Tom Watson is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia, where he was the recipient of the Curtis Brown Prize in memory of Giles Gordon. His debut novel, Metronome, was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and his short fiction has been shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize and awarded runner-up for the Se in Faol iin Prize. He lives in London.