Metronome

‘Imagined with an impressively detailed three-dimensional solidity’ Sunday Times'I loved it … You could feel the chill of the wind … Fantastic; it’s a great book' Sara Cox, BBC Two 'Between the Covers'‘Stylish and thoughtful … The eerie claustrophobia of the setting will stay with the reader for a long while.' Literary Review 'Unputdownable … An extraordinary book … as insightful and as premonitory as Orwell’s 1984’ LitroNot all that is hidden is lost.For twelve years Aina and Whitney have been in exile on an island for a crime they committed together, tethered to a croft by pills they must take for survival every eight hours. They’ve kept busy – Aina with her garden, her jigsaw, her music; Whitney with his sculptures and maps – but something is not right. Shipwrecks have begun washing up, and their supply drops have stopped. And on the day they’re meant to be collected for parole, the Warden does not come. Instead there’s a sheep. But sheep can’t swim… As days pass, Aina begins to suspect that their prison is part of a peninsula, and that Whitney has been keeping secrets. And if he’s been keeping secrets, maybe she should too. Convinced they’ve been abandoned, she starts investigating ways she might escape. As she comes to grips with the decisions that haunt her past, she realises her biggest choice is yet to come.'Taut, unsettling and so completely charged with both tension and emotion' Naomi Ishiguro'With echoes of Emily St John Mandel and Megan Hunter' Elizabeth Macneal'Tense, taut and absorbing' Gemma Reeves'As moving as it is chilling' Emma StonexReader Reviews'An original and gripping read''Addictive and atmospheric''A haunting and original dystopian story''Compelling and absorbing''A refreshing change from the norm'

Taut, unsettling and so completely charged with both tension and emotion, I found myself captivated by Metronome. I loved the clarity of its vision and the clean intensity of its prose, and I know that its vivid characters and the bleak, brutal beauty of the world they inhabit will haunt my dreams for a long time now, in the absolute best of ways, With echoes of Emily St John Mandel and Megan Hunter, this haunting literary thriller is about survival, loss and the binds that unite and break us. Chilling, eerie and powerful, A pure, tender, terrifying vision that had me gripped to its beat from the first page. Cleverly imagined and beautifully creepy, it’s a story as moving as it is chilling, Echoes the likes of Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven … A compellingly crafted debut, rich in tension and atmosphere, Imagined with an impressively detailed three-dimensional solidity

Tom Watson is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia, where he was the recipient of the Curtis Brown Prize in memory of Giles Gordon. His debut novel, Metronome, was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and his short fiction has been shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize and awarded runner-up for the Seán Ó Faoláin Prize. He lives in London.