Our Distance Became Water
the new novel by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
Paperback, 312 pages
ISBN: 9781912475483
Eris Press, London, 2024
Order your copy here
A visual, philosophical novel about a world filled with water.
“We knew very little with any certainty. One thing, though, was confirmed by everyone: that we were not the only ones flooded. For all we knew, every city across the globe had suffered a comparable fate”.
As an unnamed city finds itself partially submerged below water, a small community of friends and lovers is forced to adapt to a world that has been radically transformed. An arresting vision of the wages of ecological disaster, Our Distance Became Water is at once lyrical, moving, and psychologically acute. Endlessly inventive in both its style and its substance, this is a singularly powerful literary response to environmental change.
Praise for The Book of Water (Eris Press, 2022)
A gloriously dripping clutch of miniatures, like glimpses through keyholes into unknowable place-times where people pursue curious tasks and succumb to occult intensities.
—Sally O’Reilly
Short, fantastic choreographies of bodies, land, and water that embrace the constant motion of aqueous encounters as the sea levels rise, membranes become permeable, and everyday life adjusts to a fluid world.
—Tim Creswell
Despite their urgency, these mesmerising encounters between humans and other bodies of water have a deep stillness which lures the reader ever deeper into a surreal and mutable underworld.
—Nancy Campbell
The wonder of water is alive in these pages, not in raging storms or deep sea expeditions, but in a quotidian magical realism, where gardens become floatation tanks and paragraphs are wet words to swallow.
—Astrida Neimanis
An opera to life told through the myriad of small gestures made by humans and many others. This writing captures the beauty of aimlessness that leads to the making of an enchanting world.
—Ursula Biemann
In this elegant collection, every border is excitingly fluid and debatable, even those between human beings and their choices, their lovers, and their furniture. The effect is destabilizing in the most lyrical and illuminating way.
—Michelle Lovric
You don’t so much read Book of Water, you float in it. These haunting little fictions heighten some senses while softening others, to an effect that is curiously hallucinatory. Never have words felt so liquid, or stories so cool and refreshing.
—Robert Shearman
[The stories] are so condensed and beautifully nuanced they can be read almost as a sequence of prose poems linked by a series of ‘liquid bridges’. The Book of Water will haunt you with the resonance of its poetic undoing long after it has slipped from your hands.
—Alisson Smith, THE LINCOLN REVIEW
I thoroughly enjoyed the surrealism, playfulness of the shapeshifting and sheer immersiveness of the writing.
—Laura Windley, THE SHORT STORY