...resplendent and compelling ... Without them ever feeling forced, parallels emerge between the figure of the unruly woman — specifically one who is sexually permissive — and the unmanageable natural world ... Watts’s prose crackles with electricity in the same way that the world she’s writing about prickles with danger ... In magnificently entwining the narrator’s physical unravelling with that of the spiralling climate crisis, The Inland Sea feels both urgent and alive. It’s a lush, original Bildungsroman for a terrifying new world.

...the voice is self-aware, reflective, intelligent ... Watts joins the ranks of authors such as the late Jade Sharma, Jen Beagin and Ottessa Moshfegh – brave female writers who mine their own lives and the lives of their characters to create searing, insightful debuts – but she sets her novel apart by including a historical narrative of an early 19th-century British explorer ... Vivid mini-narratives from callers in trouble give great pace to the novel ... In The Inland Sea, she writes brilliantly on identity and the female body ... The Inland Sea is at heart an inquiry into hostile climates and our slim chances of survival.

The Inland Sea joins recent efforts like Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Jenny Offill’s Weather ... The narrator’s personal analogies between land and self are often left implicit ... This gendered squeezing is an instance of that classic figurative illusion where inhabited lands become female, empty, inert ... This is a symbolic equation so well established that the feminist critique of the trope has become its own scholarly cliché. The moments of sexual violence in The Inland Sea, when taken together with the historical feminization of terra incognita and the narrator’s implicit parallels between personal and climatalogical disaster, sit in uncomfortable proximity to those old tropes ... One answer might be that The Inland Sea rehearses these tropes with a certain amount of ironic distance ... But the novel, as I mentioned earlier, resists neat generic containment. This means it also resists unitary readings. While the woman/nature trope as a kind of self-flagellating youthful hubris is operative here, mostly I think the comparisons are up to something earnest ... Watts’s novel is best read as a call to start seeing beyond finite empathy economies. It plays with the idea that understanding ecological and personal catastrophes through each other is something cringey and then challenges that cringe’s gendered stakes. The Inland Sea doesn’t assert the equivalence of climate catastrophe and the guy who doesn’t call, but allows them to exist in concert.

Throughout this blighted coming-of-age story, Ms. Watts seeds curious capsule histories about Australia’s earliest colonizers and their disappointed dreams of finding an Eden-like oasis at the heart of the barren continent. One comes to look forward to these tangents, not only because they are odd and evocative but because they impose some variety upon the narrative. Ms. Watts writes with unquestionable poise and intelligence, but the tone of the writing is uniformly flat and too little happens in the scenes themselves to create any ripples.

Watts’s protagonist, the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of real-life explorer John Oxley, is fairly Hazzard-esque: introspective, stubborn, transgressive, and precise about language and history. And Watts looks to the future much as Hazzard did, with a sense of opportunity undercut by ill fate ... The Inland Sea has a profound ecological consciousness, grounded in an acute sense of place ... The Inland Sea doesn’t fail, as art or as argument. But it does read, at times, as if it’s aiming primarily for proof of concept, aiming just to show that Ghosh’s challenge can be met (and that a feminist consciousness helps a novelist meet it) ... The narrator brings the philosophizing on the inland sea to a perfectly satisfying conclusion ... The Inland Sea demonstrates both what realist fiction can offer, as we try harder to grapple with climate crisis, and what it can’t. You can’t shoehorn the melting icecaps into the quaver of a lover’s voice. But you can describe how hot it is in the bedroom even out of season, how hard it is to sleep ... Nonetheless, in its ambient, unsettling way, the novel also offers a more immediate imagining of the openness we can practice, if we care to, while we still have the chance.

For all its evocative local textures, Watts’ novel shares much of its literary DNA with a North American tradition of melancholic summer novels in which women who fall afoul of gendered hypocrisies feel the pull of their bodies to blood, their minds to disintegration ... The myth of Cassandra hovers portentously over the novel, which links a maddening political failure to heed the projections of climate science to the plight of women cursed never to be believed ... Watts is liberal with metaphor, and her penchant for figurative responses to material power disparities leads the reader into slippery terrain. Invoking the colonial analogue of earth and women’s bodies implicit in terra incognita, her ecofeminist critique of the trope shades into provocative redeployment of it ... Watts appears to sidestep her white narrator’s implication in the colonial project, as though her voluntary abdication of agency absolves her of any responsibility at all ... Frustrating any smug indictment of her novel, as Watts charts her young narrator’s twenty-first century voyage out, she mounts a self-reflexive engagement with the cringe, and the contemporary conditions that inflame it: from our nation’s brash strong man politics and grossly negligent climate policy to an indifference, bordering on hostility, to the arts. This last, Watts handles heavy-handedly ... Though Watts’ ambitions are admirable, her election of a white, ‘titian’ haired narrator to the role of unheeded prophet encapsulates the novel’s limitations. The narration is executed with the confidence of an A student, who is across the issues and therefore absolved from further scrutiny ... The Inland Sea is an omnivorous, heady debut dense with paradox and provocation. With no pretensions to lighting the way out of our current mess, Watts guides us into the thicket.

With great skill that is both meticulous in detail and vast in ambition, Watts constructs a claustrophobic, sweltering dome over her protagonist, one that captures contemporary anxieties around ideas of identity, femininity and the environment. The Inland Sea is a welcome addition to the new era of the ecological novel, but Watts goes further than commenting on her protagonist’s environment, instead using the genre to explore apathy, cruelty and repercussions across generations ... a warning and atonement for our future and our past.

With The Inland Sea, Watts has produced a model of autofiction in the age of climate disaster, a genre sure to dominate the coming era. The motivating logic of the novel rests on a conflation of internal and external emergency that would likely ring true to many young adults. As the novel develops, it becomes clear that this is not a purely solipsistic device but, rather, a reflection of the permanent place the climate emergency holds in the minds of those who have grown up contending with its brutal realities ... Introspective with a febrile realism that borders on the surreal, Madeleine Watts's The Inland Sea is as evocative and haunting as works by Samantha Hunt or Ottessa Moshfegh.

Watts uses this connection throughout the story to convey the narrator’s hope and skepticism that a fruitful and contented life is possible. The powerful metaphors, relatable negotiation for a satisfying livelihood, and ethereal setting make Watts’ debut a can’t-miss.

Australian writer Watts punctuates her eloquent debut with deep-seated anxiety about climate change ... While the narrative moves haphazardly, the prose is consistently rich and loaded with imagery. Watts’s bold, unconventional outing makes for a distinctive entry into the climate fiction genre.

This aura of detachment doesn't mean the narrator is callous but instead points to a central tension running through the novel: the narrator's desire to be separate from a body that feels too much. Watts plays with this idea of dissociation by creating a heroine who writes to the reader from a future vantage point without ever revealing her own name (and giving pseudonyms to everyone in her life) ... Magnificently uncomfortable.