Inland Sea

Inland Sea is a novel by the Australian writer Madeleine Watts, published in 2020. It is told by a young woman who has just finished college and has taken a job answering emergency calls in Sydney.

The work is monotonous and it is also relentless. Over the course of an eight-hour shift the narrator is dropped into hundreds of crises, hearing only pieces of each one before the line closes, and the accumulated stress of listening to disasters she cannot reach seeps into her days and nights. The callers are strangers and most of the disasters are small, but they accumulate into something she cannot put down at the end of a shift.

Around the emergency calls the novel runs a second history, of nineteenth-century explorers who set out to find an inland sea in the middle of Australia and did not come back with what they went looking for. The heroine's own behaviour becomes self-destructive, and the book joins the small disasters that arrive through a telephone headset to the large ones that the landscape in front of her is beginning to show.