Amphibian

(Hardback)

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Description

Sissy is used to being on the outside. The new girl in her West Country school, she recently arrived with her troubled mother, prone to letting Sissy fend for herself.

But from the day Sissy fights a boy in front of Tegan, she's no longer alone. Bonded by violence, they grow so close they feel like one being: wrapped around each other in bed at sleepovers, sending photographs to men they meet online, and scaring each other with reports of the girls being snatched at night in their town.

Over the course of the school year, they find themselves on the threshold of girlhood, with threats gathering thick and fast around them. And as their make-believe worlds bleed into their daily lives, Sissy feels herself transforming into something strange and terrifying.

Amphibian is atender, haunting coming-of-age debut about desire, precocity and the intensity of early friendships that have the power to upend our lives.

Reviews

Tyler Wetherall is a fine writer and a great storyteller. Her debut novel is unlike anything else I have read. As a tale of childhood friendship, it brims with sex and violence and threat, and moves to a crescendo of strange and magical beauty. I recognised the strangeness of my own girlhood in it, and I am sure that other readers will do the same. Amphibian will stay with me for a long time. Tyler's art is to weave together a weight of observatory realist detail with the surreal - what Elizabeth Bishop called the 'surreality of the everyday'. The result here is terrific. * Rebecca Stott, Costa Award winning author of In the Days of Rain *

Author Bio

Tyler Wetherall is an author, journalist, screenwriter and teacher who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her first book, the memoir No Way Home, about a childhood spent on the run with her fugitive father, was hailed as "Lucid, tender, exquisitely re-imagined and compulsively readable"; "wondrous and richly detailed" ; "a luminous memoir that nobody who reads it will soon forget". Her short fiction has appeared in the Gettysburg Review and Brooklyn Vol. 1, and she has written for Modern Love, the Guardian, Vice and Conde Nast Traveler.