The Watermark is a wonderful imagining of what it would be like to be transported into a world of fiction via a multitude of different teas. I call it a reimagining because for me, it was almost Alice in Wonderland for grownups in a modern world. Glorious escapism


Thank you to NetGalley, Granta Publications and the author Sam Mills for this wonderful ARC. My review is left voluntarily and all opinions are my own

The Watermark presents a fascinating premise: what would happen if real people could be transported into a fictional world? The concept of using specially brewed teas to move in and out of a book adds a unique and magical twist. These teas not only facilitate the transition but also cause the drinker to forget their real life, allowing them to fully immerse themselves and live authentically within the narrative. It’s an intriguing exploration of identity, escapism, and the power of stories to shape our sense of self.

Many thanks to Sam Mills, Netgalley, and the publishers (Granta) for an ARC of this wonderfully original novel, which was published in August.

Young journalist Jaime thinks that he's on the verge of a big break after being selected to interview the reclusive big-name, prize-winning author Augustus Fate in his secluded cottage. However, when he arrives, Fate drugs Jaime with some spiked tea, and Jaime wakes to find himself a young boy in a Victorian sensation novel. Unaware that he's actually a twenty-something from the twenty-first century, he falls in love with Rachel, a young governess suspected of inheriting her mother's mental instability. As the truth dawns slowly, Jaime wonders how to return to his real life, and how to save Rachel. And so begins their journey through various genres and time periods (modern-day Manchester, dystopian-future London etc.) as they try to find their way back to their real lives.

This is an incredibly clever novel, although how much you enjoy it will depend on how much you appreciate all the genres that are contained within it. While I really liked the Victorian sensation section and Rachel and Jaime's jaded future in an alternative London, there's also another section, which I'd probably describe as a social realist story set in 1920's Carpathia, which I felt went on for too long. (Having said that, there is a beautiful graphic-novel interlude in that section.)

The book also has a lot to say about fate, free will, and the meaning of life and what it's worth living for, but I feel like I would need to read it at least once more to make sense of all the different ideas embedded in the text. It's also quite funny in places. (When Jaime shows signs of rebellion, Fate finds a clever way to keep Jaime imbibing the spiked tea in his next novel.)

Overall, I'd recommend it to curious readers who enjoy time-travelling, or genre-bending books of ideas.

Great idea; however, I wasn't a fan of the execution. I was really drawn into the book, but as the story progressed, I felt it started to get a bit muddled. It wasn't very well explored or discussed, and the story felt longer than needed.

I’m late with this review, having read this book 3 weeks ago. It’s on my mind a lot and I’ve finally found time to write this.

The Watermark (Aug 2024) by Sam Mills is an expansive (at over 500 pages) and ambitious piece of work. It’s whimsical, eccentric, and a thoroughly wild ride.

Journalist Jaime meets a suicidal artist Rachel online. As Rachel deeply admires the enigmatic novelist Augustus Fate, Jaime hopes to impress her by interviewing Fate, an opportunity he has ‘won’ through a competition.

Despite having multiple Booker Prize nominations, Fate struggles with a lack of depth and authenticity in his characters. To remedy this problem, he lures first Rachel and then Jaime to his rural home where he drugs them and traps them in his work-in-progress titled Thomas Turridge, set in 1860s Oxford with Jaime as the titular Thomas. Stripped of their previous identities and memories, the star-crossed lovers are subjected to Fate’s manipulation, who hopes their actions in the novel will inspire a literary masterpiece.

Jaime and Rachel gradually regain awareness within the novel’s world. They notice subtle inconsistencies that hint at their real selves and the presence of the real world. A humorous scene is when a helicopter arrives during a church service, leading to a dramatic escape into another book set in a poorly imagined Manchester in 2014.

They continue to travel through worlds within novels including a magical-realist Russia set in the 1920s and a dystopian future in the 2040s. The ending is fairly satisfying too.

It’s a fun and thought-provoking meta-narrative that blurs the line between fiction and reality, taking a deep look at what being an ‘author’ means. I don’t think I’ve read anything like this before. I love stories about stories and writers so this is totally up my alley.

Thank you to Sam Mills, Granta Books and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for a review.

Meta fiction is a genre I always gravitate to. I love books and I love books about books, whether they be about the objects themselves or the stories they hold within them.

The Watermark consists of five stories, exploring 2047 London to the Victorian era to 1920's Carpathians. Each new setting sees Jamie and Rachel as different people struggling to remember who they were and then try to escape the book they're in. They drink Grand Kuding tea to enter into the novel and Soma to come out of it.

You might think that reading this five times over would get boring, but as they enter books within books the stakes get higher and escape seems further and further away. There's some elements that are across all storylines, but they're different enough to keep you captivated. Each section was at a good length so I wasn't bored with the setting before moving on to the next one.

I was expecting a story that's adventurous, whimsical and playful but I found something much more sinister and dark. At times I felt sad for Jamie and Rachel, almost willing them to be free as if I had any power of the story.

The chapters from Fate's perspective almost made it a horror story. I could easily see this as dark horror film or a series of American Horror Story. I think that would have allowed Mills to really delve into the hopelessness you felt at times for the characters.

There is some mention of the Covid-19 pandemic, but as it's set from 2019 onwards, it would be weird to not mention it entirely, as much as we would all like to forget it happened.

I'm by no means the first to make this comparison, but The Watermark is very much Inception for bibliophiles. It's an ambitious concept, made even better by the fact that Sam Mills pulled it off. I very quickly felt comfortable and safe in the author's hands.

It's a completely immersive novel and by the end of it you'll feel as if you've had some Grand Kuding tea yourself.

I give The Watermark by Sam Mills four stars!

There's a lot of potential and good ideas but somehow it didn't work. I think that the author is a good storyteller but there's was a bit of confusion in the plot

Loved the idea and was really taken by how this book began. I had moments of uncertainty but grew to love the characters. That was until I realised I wasn’t even half way through but felt like I’d been reading for weeks. I’m sorry I just couldn’t finish it.

The Watermark has a really intriguing premise - what would happen if real people were transported into a fictional world? I liked the idea of drinking different special teas to be transported in and out of a book, causing the person to forget their real life and live authentically within the narrative.

However, I didn’t really understand the love story between the main characters Jaime and Rachel. They were in love just because. And Augustus Fate was evil just because. And it’s a long book when you’re not really invested in the characters.

Sam Mills is known for her fiction and as co-founder of indie press Dodo Ink. Here she builds on f theorists like Baudrillard, from his work on reality versus representation of reality to his later aphoristic Cool Memories, to construct a series of intricate, interlinking stories centred on aspiring couple Jaime and Rachel. After Jaime travels to interview faded, Booker author Augustus Fate, he finds himself trapped in Fate’s latest novel, a Victorian pastiche in which Jaime plays the title role, and Rachel surfaces as a local governess with whom he becomes infatuated. It soon transpires that Jaime and Rachel have been drugged and somehow inserted into Fate’s work.

Mills’s story follows Jaime and Rachel’s attempts to escape from fiction to reality, journeying through multiple storylines in search of freedom: moving to a realist plot set in near-contemporary Manchester to the Carpathians in the 1920s to London in the distant future. Mills interweaves elements taken from the work of authors from Henry James to Dickens, Camus, Aldous Huxley, and Asimov in his robot phase. All of which combine to form a commentary on the nature of narrative itself; its relationship to the grand narratives of the eras in which it was produced from God to Darwin to Marxism to capitalism; the role that narrative plays in the ways that readers interpret their experiences; and the interaction between narrative and individuals reflecting on their own identities and ability to shape their life stories. Building, in part, on Baudrillard’s theories on the ways in which people might seek to escape into the technologies they created.

Certain characters, events and themes recur in each of the storylines Jaime and Rachel enter - albeit slightly reconfigured, sometimes slightly skewed. Rachel retains her original position as an artist, musing on the nature of art – panacea or iconoclastic - and the social constraints placed on women artists. Both Jaime and Rachel are bound up in thoughts about fate versus self-determination, what makes life real, how much of their understanding of their worlds is shaped by their societies and the culture of their time.

It's a lengthy, sprawling novel, ambitious and inventive, I found elements gripping and entertaining, others a little overegged, repetitive. It’s the kind of book likely to appeal to fans of writers like Scarlett Thomas, Haruki Murakami or David Mitchell or of films like The Matrix and Synecdoche, New York. Unfortunately, although these are authors and pieces I can admire to a certain extent, they don’t massively appeal to me. I had a similar response to Mills’s novel, I admired numerous aspects, I enjoyed others particularly the sections set in the future. But overall, I was never fully engaged with this or totally invested in the concepts it sets out to examine.

Ambitious but flawed near-fantasy novel

This year alone, I've read about a dozen books with meta- or semi-metatextual structures, some more successful than others.

This is not one of those.

Essentially, *spoiler* two relatively ordinary protagonists are trapped in literature by a mastermind, and the book then chronicles their escape from their enemy's clutches. In the world of the book, the mastermind is a Booker Prize nominated author, which is where the book starts to fall apart: the first book, the author's current project, in which the heroes get trapped is a turgid, sub-Dickens or sub-Gaskell, mid-Victorian pastiche, which is isn't supposed to be a badly written book as the author's publishers are relatively happy with it, apart from the appearance of a helicopter crashing into the local church—I can't even. But it is badly written, as is the opening frame, as are the interim sections with the author in the real world (of the book), as are the following novels into which the heroes escape on their way back to reality.

The machine of Mills's fantasy is not explained, explored or even discussed; it just is and it works in the real world and in the book worlds in exactly the same way. It's like The Matrix set in a slush pile.

One star.

The Watermark is an ambitious blend of high-concept romance and lit fic pastiche. A famously reclusive author grants an interview to a competition winner, Jaime, a recent PhD graduate who hopes to spin a career out of said interview. Take a trip to an isolated cottage, much weirdness ensues, and after a cup of drugged tea Jaime wakes up inside the author's new novel. The author is called Augustus Fate, so quite how serious Sam Mills is being with their metafictional workout is unclear. Fate has had writer's block and recent criticism that his characterisation hasn't come off as real. Hence he has trapped people to play roles in his book to flesh them out a bit. The mechanism to how this happens is unclear, initially Jaime, and a woman he had been interacting with on suicide noticeboards Rachel, are subsumed by the written roles they are put in. But slowly their awareness unfolds and they start acting anachronistically for the pastiche Dickens book they find themselves in. Unable to go up, they go out, into a modern state of the nation style romance (a segment where they at least explore some of the workings of the concept, then a mid-twentieth century Russian novel, and some rather unconvincing sci-fi too.

The problem with this kind of meta-fictional concept is to what degree the pastiches work, and are compelling in their own right? Unfortunately for me, the only one that really worked was the Russian one, which is also the one where our lead characters are most subsumed in the narrative they find themselves in. But then I never really found Jaime or Rachel all that compelling to start off with, and combined with their low-level depressive beginnings (she is a visual artist who has given up), the impetus for them to escape beyond that being the plot of a book like this never convinced. Indeed when they find themselves in the contemporary novel, they are tempted to stay there, if just to avoid COVID and be safe. In some ways, it felt like the scrapings of some short stories bent into shape around the meta-fictional narrative, and the execution - and the characters - needed to be a lot better to make me like it. I finished to find out how it would end, but I had stopped caring quite some time before.

I really liked the idea behind The Watermark: 2 humans fuelling a narrative, doing the bidding of the narrator/storyteller. At first, the jumping from narrative to narrative was fun, the common elements connective the stories and characters were fascinating to discover, but by the time we were jumping into the 3rd narrative while only hitting the 40% mark, I started to become quite worried. And indeed, I had solid reasons to be worried: as the same pattern repeats itself another few times, with the last 20% being absolutely excruciating to go through! I felt that very little has been added to the core story with each narrative, character development has been minimal too, therefore repetition at nauseam of the same few plot lines won;t make for a great read! Yes some interesting ideas have been thrown in, raging from art to politics, but again, one does not have to bare a million pages just for that! And to top it all up, the end left me in a rage!! After not giving up on this narrative, when I should have, to be served with that ridiculous ending..nah that was just too much to bare!!

Thank you to the publishers for the ARC!

I'm finding this review tricky to write, as there were things about The Watermark which I loved, but I also feel it's deeply flawed. There are the bones of something wonderful, but the narrative doesn't flesh them out.

Jaime thinks he's going to conduct an interview with the famous writer, Augustus Fate, and that will be that. Unfortunately, that isn't that. Fate, who is struggling to give his characters personalities that come alive, drugs him and holds him hostage in his latest novel. There, Jaime discovers Rachel, the woman he's never met, but with whom he's fallen in love. They are both Fate's captives. The novel tells the story of their fictional explorations, their developing romance, and their attempts to escape. This involves travelling through four different books, each set in a different time period and location.

I LOVED the concept of this book, which is why I requested it and was grateful to be chosen for an ARC. Unfortunately, I struggled through most of it and came very close to quitting half-way through. Sam Mills' prose is strong and poetic, something distractingly so, but the writing was polished enough to pull me in. There are many beautiful lines expressing wonderful thoughts, which I highlighted to re-vist. I didn't find her storytelling equally compelling, due to the long stretches in which Jaime and Rachel simply wander around, thinking deeply about their relationship and situation. The Russian section, in particular, is torturously slow and repetitive. (FYI to the publisher, it's also full of glitches, sections missing, and the illustrations didn't show up on my Kindle. I just had blank pages.)

I'm taking a wild guess in suspecting that the author is a big fan of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (one my personal favourite novels) as The Watermark echoes it to an extent. In Cloud Atlas, however, each story written in a different genre felt very much like a it was written in a different genre. The writing style didn't really change between sections in the Watermark, however. The 2047 section didn't feel futuristic, the prose style wasn't that different from the style in the Manchester section. It all felt like it was written by the same author, which wasn't the case within the world-building.

I did very much enjoy the 2047 section, though. The characters came to life and the story progressed forward and kept me involved. I liked how the characters aged a bit through each section, as if passing through their lives. I suspect the book mused on many interesting ideas about fiction, immersion, choice, etc, but the story didn't keep me involved. I'll definitely keep thinking about this book, I just really wish the story-telling has been tighter and stronger. The world-building was also very vague and muddled, which wouldn't have bothered me so much if the story had held me hostage.

I enjoyed the ending, which I won't spoil.

I really don’t know what genre you would call this, but it’s a great mindbender! There is a love story at the heart of it all. This was absolutely original and I was thoroughly entertained. Many thanks to NetGalley for an arc of this book

Although it sometimes threatens to tipple under the weight of its own premise, The Watermark is both an audacious meta-literary romp and also a love letter to love. Like a hallucinogenic combination of Inception and Page Master, The Watermark is full of smarts and heart, even if it's own meta-ness is sometimes a bit too clever for its own sake.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy of this book.

I really struggled with this and it has taken me ages to read. I am just not able to get my head around people appearing in books in the way described in this novel.

From the cover I thought the modern characters would appear in already written well known/classic books and interact with the characters but it is not at all like that. As far as I can make out they appear in a book which is being written by a modern author and they are alongside another author who is similarly imprisoned and who writes book in our world and also in the worlds of the books the main characters are in. Confused? I was.

I didnt like the Russian story at all, I felt it was even more confusing than the Victorian and Manchester ones. i didn't connect with any of the characters either so, unusually for me, I am struggling to find positive things to say.

Maybe there are all sorts of satire, profound thoughts and parallels with modern events going on but I did not pick up on any of these. I really must say this is just a 2.5 for me and i will round up to 3.

This is such a brilliant idea for a book and I was definitely drawn to the premise. I felt so sorry for the couple trapped in what felt like a bit of an Alice in Wonderland-esque world, but the book did feel a little rushed in places.

If you can get past that, though, it is a very enjoyable story.