Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

(Paperback)

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Description

Books may be Mayumi Saito's greatest love and her one source of true pleasure. 41 years old, a bored wife and a dutiful mother, Mayumi's job as a librarian on a small island off the coast of New England feeds her passion for reading but does little to remedy the boredom of her days. That is, until the day she issues a library card to a shy 17 year-old boy, and swiftly succumbs to a sexual obsession that subverts the way she sees the library, her family, the island she lives on, and ultimately herself.

Reviews

Praise for Mayumi and The Sea of Happiness

Mayumi's trespasses and thrills are so deeply imagined that I lived her affair with her, cheering her even as I knew I would drown with her in her ecstasy. This book's fierce physicality glitters beneath the surface of every heady sentence."--Susanna Daniel, author of Stilsville and Sea Creatures

"Jennifer Tseng delivers an elegant exploration of passion and its consequences while casting her observant eye on motherhood, memory, exile, and female friendship. Carnal, witty, and slyly crafted, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness is a sizzling fuse of a novel, with an explosion bigger and better than anything you can imagine."--Sara Levine, author of Treasure Island!!!

This is a confession that reads like an exultation, and Mayumi's gleeful admissions will likely keep the reader turning pages at the kind of speed that inspires papercuts."--The Seattle Review of Books

"The love scenes don't lack for erotic description and detail, and Mayumi's obsessive admiration for the young man swings between coolly perceptive and discomfitingly overheated. But the precision and poetry of Tseng's writing keep the book from meandering too far in the direction [of pure romance]...Tseng explores time and place, isolation and connection, and veers more toward the lyrical than the lurid."--Kirkus Reviews

Author Bio

Jennifer Tseng's first book The Man With My Face won the 2005 Asian American Writers' Workshop's National Poetry Manuscript Competition and a 2006 PEN American Center Open Book Award. Her second book Red Flower, White Flower, winner of the Marick Press Poetry Prize, features Chinese translations by Mengying Han and Aaron Crippen. Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness is her debut novel. She works at the West Tisbury Library on Martha's Vineyard.