Mother Waters

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 clacks 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.

About the Author

Lisa Nan Joo writes fiction, poetry and criticism. She was shortlisted for the Richell Prize in 2022 for this Mother Waters. The judges praised the “beautiful writing” and described the work as an “effortlessly crafted novel that combines a dark mystery with a contemporary thread [that] entranced them all”. She also received a Varuna Residency to continue work on this manuscript in 2023. Her writing has been published by Meanjin, Overland and Kill Your Darlings, among others. Lisa holds a PhD in Creative Practice from UNSW, where she has also taught creative writing.