The Watermark — Sam Mills

A quirky, literary love story like no other, one that veers wildly from contemporary Britain to Soviet Russia to a bizarre but recognizable future, from one of the UK's hottest young novelists...

Rachel and Jaime: their story isn't simple. It might not even be their story.

Augustus Fate, a once-lauded novelist and now renowned recluse, is struggling with his latest creation. But when Jaime and Rachel stumble into his remote cottage, he spies opportunity, imprisoning them inside his novel-in-progress. Now, the fledgling couple must try to find their way back home through a labyrinthine network of novels.

And as they move from Victorian Oxford to a utopian Manchester, a harsh Russian winter to an AI-dominated near-future, so too does the narrative of their relationship change time and again.

Together, they must figure out if this relationship of so many presents can have any future at all.

The Watermark is a heart-stopping exploration of the narratives we cling to in the course of a life, and the tendency of the world to unravel them. Kaleidoscopic and wildly imaginative, it asks: how can we truly be ourselves, when Fate is pulling the strings?