In the more elated periods of the writing (though, as with any book, there were some bleak doldrums) I felt I could do and get away with anything. I recognised, even as I wrote it, that it was ‘bigger’, more ambitious than anything I’d previously attempted. In less overt ways, though not all of them marking an unprecedented crossing into new terrain, it was a watershed too. When it was opened it apparently caused lots of screams. Eels feature prominently in the book, and the day before the launch party I bought a large smoked eel from a fishmonger’s in Soho, had it wrapped and sent to my publishers. It came out, in 1983, at a time when there was real excitement in the air about new fiction by new young novelists, and its publication was great fun.

Materially, it enabled me, after years of needing to do other jobs, to see if I could survive by writing alone. It was my third novel but the first to gain a large readership and to be widely translated. It’s not just playing with words to say that Waterland marked a watershed in my career. ‘A quite brilliant novel’ Daily Telegraph It is also a book about beer, eels, the French Revolution, the end of the world, windmills, will-o’-the-wisps, murder, love, education, curiosity and-supremely-the malign and merciful element of water. Compulsively readable, it is a novel of resonant depth and encyclopaedic richness, mixing human and natural history and exploring the tragic forces that take us both forwards and back. Waterland is a classic of modern fiction: a vision of England seen through its mysterious, amphibious Fen country a sinuous meditation on the workings of time a tale of two families, startling in its twists and turns and universal in its reach. Nearly forty years later, his son Tom, a history teacher, is driven by a bizarre marital crisis and the provocation of one of his students to forsake the formal teaching of history-and tell stories. One summer morning in 1943, lock-keeper Henry Crick finds the drowned body of a sixteen-year-old boy.

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LAST ORDERS AND MOTHERING SUNDAY, reissued for the first time in Scribner

Waterland by Graham Swift