Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night is a novel about mothering, midwifery, wolves, post-apocalyptic feminism, gold, hope, hunger, Streatham, Cuba, pregnancy, theft, body hair, bicycles and peacocks being bastards. Truffles and lightning. Sex on boats. Being bold and being safe. It's about an underachieving millennial, a retired midwife and an Irish Rastafarian who set out from London after the end of the world to cycle to a sanctuary in the southern Alps. And it's about the fact that the thing about the end of the world is that it happens all the time.

'In Gethan Dick's ambitious, inventive and stirring debut novel, the characters have lived, oxymoronically, beyond the end of the world... [it] is a curious and expansive text. I have called it an odyssey. It is also a love story. It is dystopian fiction, but also utopian. It is a philosophical study, full of pertinent, unanswerable questions. What does the world look like after the veil of civilization has lifted? What continues to matter, and what does not? Are there some things that are so real, they continue after the end? Like love? Like life?' Niamh Donnelly, Irish Times

'A pandemic, untold numbers dead, an assorted bunch of survivors and their journey to an apparent sanctuary in the south of France make for a refreshing look at ideas of hope, survival and complacency, and an unsettlingly resonant debut. Punchy.' Best Books for Summer 2025, Daily Mail

'Gethan Dick's novel is not only charmingly hilarious, it is also a deeply serious and philosophically capacious book, particularly in relation to womanhood.' Irish Examiner

'Bristling with energy, Gethan Dick’s Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night is an original and vital perspective on much more than how a world ends: on how it begins.' -- Oana Aristide, author of Under the Blue

‘Softcore Armageddon, perhaps: Society has collapsed after plague and war, but while wolves do howl and marauders do maraude, such menaces feel distinctly remote. Consequently, the book opens to strange and tender emotions. These quiet melancholies of a slow calamity give the reader pause – especially as Dick nudges us to ask if we’re in one already.’ New Statesman

'Exquisite in quality... The first-person narration is smart and tight, and the humour is razor-sharp. Gethan Dick's power lies in how she encapsulates emotion and deep philosophical conundrums so expertly in such few words. Dick is a writer worthy of our time, and a writer, I believe, who we'll be reading long into the future.' Irish Independent

'Evocative... Like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Octavia E Butler’s Parable of the Sower, this is the novel of a journey both away from and toward. Its originality lies in the appeal of the narrative voice, one of millennial diffidence that is still somehow salted with optimism. “So, to be straight: I didn’t see it coming, I don’t know why it happened, and I don’t know what’s going to happen.” The Guardian

‘Gethan’s artistic eye for detail, her ability to connect the everyday with the existential, has resulted in an original and lyrical piece of work. Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night is a compelling statement in these strange times, and unlike anything I’ve read in recent memory.’ – Johny Pitts, author of Afropean

‘The spectrum of themes that interests Gethan is vast, generous, funny, resistant and alive.’ – Valérie Manteau, novelist and winner of the Prix Renaudot

‘Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night brings a much-needed new voice and energy to the post-apocalyptic novel. The world that Gethan creates is equally strange and familiar but always thought-provoking.’ – Jarred McGinnis, author of The Coward

'This is a genuinely striking debut. Gethan Dick tells her story with a visceral immediacy that keeps the pages turning and the reader locked in right to the end.' -- Mike McCormack, author of Solar Bones

‘I adore a well-thought novel about the collapse of civilization. This is a great one.’ Rick O’Shea, Irish Independent