Water in the Desert Fire in the Night

'Gethan's artistic eye for detail, her ability to connect the everyday with the existential, has resulted in an original and lyrical piece of work ... unlike

anything I've read in recent memory.' - Johny Pitts, presenter of R4's 'A Good Read' and author of Afropean

'The spectrum of themes that interests Gethan is vast, generous, funny, resistant and alive.' - Valerie Manteau, novelist and winner of the Prix Renaudot

The thing about the end of the world is that it happens all the time.
Someone leaves and it's the end of the world.
Somebody puts their cock in you and it's the end of the world.
Somebody stops putting their cock in you and it's the end of the world.


Because the thing about the end of the world is that it happens all the time.
Someone leaves and it's the end of the world.
Someone comes back and it's the end of the world.
Somebody puts their cock in you and it's the end of the world.
Somebody stops putting their cock in you and it's the end of the world.

Here is a novel about mothering, wolves, bicycles, midwifery, post-apocalyptic feminism, gold, hunger and hope.
It's about an underachieving millennial, a retired midwife and an Irishman who set out from London after the end of the world to cycle to a sanctuary in the southern Alps. It's about the porousness of the female bodily experience, the challenges of being an empiricist with a sample size of one, what's worth knowing, what's worth living, and the necessity of irrationality.
It's about the fact that the world ends all the time, and it's about what to try to do next.