The Water Takes

By: Sarah Walker

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Paperback | 31 March 2026

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23.4 x 15.3

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AN UNIMAGINABLE APOCALYPSE.

A SCARED YOUNG GIRL.

A STUBBORN OLD WOMAN.

NEITHER WILL SURVIVE WITHOUT THE OTHER.

Pam is in her mid-seventies, widowed and hiding from the world behind a caustic sense of humour. Her health is declining, and she’s afraid of dying alone, but her most pressing concern is complaining to the council about her waterlogged garden.

When Pam’s ten-year-old neighbour, Charlotte, is foisted upon her, a tentative friendship begins to unfurl, cracking open Pam’s hard exterior.

But the puddles in the garden become pools, and then sinkholes. Nowhere seems safe. With no help coming, Pam and Charlotte can only shelter in place for so long – eventually, they know they must attempt to navigate a catastrophically altered world.

The Water Takes is a work of astonishing literary imagination with the urgent page-turning propulsion of a thriller. Full of surprises and revelations, with a sense of humanity that is never clichéd or sentimental, The Water Takes will make you laugh and cry – and it will stay with you forever.

‘Made me laugh and roar and weep.’ KATE MILDENHALL

'Dizzyingly good.' JACQUELINE BUBLITZ

About the Author

Sarah Walker is a Naarm/Melbourne-based writer and artist. She writes about anxiety, intimacy and absurdity, in both fiction and non-fiction. She has a particular interest in the body, and the ways in which it escapes our control, as well as how apprehension of disaster impacts our sense of the present.

Her first book, The First Time I Thought I Was Dying, a collection of non-fiction essays about the unruly body in late capitalism, won the 2021 Quentin Bryce Award. In 2025, she was awarded the Kill Your Darlings Creative Nonfiction Essay Prize. Sarah is also an award-winning photographer and fine artist, whose work has been commissioned across multiple countries.

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