Waterland

Waterland is a novel by the English writer Graham Swift, published in 1983. It is set in the Fens of eastern England, it won the Guardian Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and it was adapted into a film in 1992.

Tom Crick is fifty-two and has been a history master for around thirty years at a secondary school in Greenwich. He has been married to Mary for as long as he has been teaching, and the two of them have no children.

Under pressure from the school, Tom changes his teaching to telling tales drawn from his own recollection rather than from the syllabus. Then his wife is arrested for taking a baby, the publicity does the school no good, and he is told that he must retire.

He turns the forced retirement into an excuse to tell his students the story of his own family, which is tangled up with the history of the Fens and with the eel. It includes his brother's attraction to the woman who became Tom's wife, a murder, a girl who has an abortion that leaves her unable to have children and who later struggles with depression, and the things that follow from all of it.