"First published in Great Britain in 2020 by One, an imprint of Pushkin Press"--Title page verso.

After her final year in college, a young writer begins working part-time as an emergency dispatch operator in Sydney. Over the course of an eight-hour shift, she is dropped into hundreds of crises, hearing only pieces of each. The work itself becomes monotonous. And yet the stress of listening to far-off disasters seeps into her personal life, and she begins drinking heavily, sleeping with strangers, having an affair with an ex-lover. Interwoven with the woman's self-destructive unraveling is the story of how, two centuries earlier, her great-great-great-great-grandfather--the British explorer John Oxley--traversed the wilderness of Australia in search of water. Oxley never found the inland sea, but the myth was taken up by other men, and over the years, search parties walked out into the desert, dying as they tried to find it. With a life unraveling and the gradual worsening of the climate crisis, this book is charged with unflinching insight into our age of anxiety. At a time when wildfires have swept an entire continent, it asks what refuge and comfort looks like in a constant state of emergency.--From book cover flap.