Summerwater by Sarah Moss

Amid a Scottish summer's rainy backdrop of a day, Moss sets the stage with disparate groupings of strangers temporarily part of a reluctant lakeside vacation community. With the gloomy weather largely keeping them indoors and in their secluded cabins, Moss dips in and out of the various points of view as they observe and judge. But with Summerwater, what Moss is really getting at with her microcosm on a wet Scottish day, besides the inevitability of exposing the sheer, fallible humanity of everyone, is a critical exploration on social class.

Moss splays out the story in chapters with pointed titles leaning purposefully pretentious — like the title of the book itself — each one a different character's perspective told from third-person and anchored with present tense.

As much as I am against the ongoing onslaught of present tense in most fiction, stream-of-consciousness and introspective novels, with no real plot to speak of, prove time and again to be the exception. The immediacy of the thoughts that swirl in and around these characters (moms, dads, children, a young couple, and older couple, teens, etc.) are perhaps best suited to the strategy of present tense.

The result of Moss's work is a strong current of words that leaves behind the remnants shed by each person along the way, especially poignant in how they view each other, creating multi-faceted characters and an atmosphere full of longing, dissatisfaction, tension, and dissonance.

Audiobook, as narrated by Morven Christie: Christie did a beautiful job — the soft rhythm of her performance, as she flowed through each character Moss brings out along the way, was perfectly suited to the contained and pensive tenor of Summerwater.