Sea Monsters

(Paperback)

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The third novel from the inimitble Chloe Aridjis, one of the most taleneted and promising young writers in English today Winner of the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award 'A mesmerizing, revelatory novel, smart and funny and laced with a strangeness... For my money, Chloe Aridjis is one of the most brilliant novelists working in English today' Garth Greenwell One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, 17-year-old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with the reckless, impulsive Tomas, a boy she barely knows. Their quest- to track down a troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs who have recently escaped a touring circus. Together they head for Zipolite, the 'Beach of the Dead', a community peopled by hippies, nudists, beach combers and eccentric storytellers, and Luisa searches for someone, anyone, who will 'promise, no matter what, to remain a mystery'. But as Luisa wanders the shoreline, she begins to discover that a quest is more easily envisioned than accomplished. 'Destined to be a classic- a richly imaginative, reflective and entracing novel' Xiaolu Guo

Reviews

The novel's brilliance lies in capturing so convincingly that state of adolescent restlessness... Aridjiss languid prose lets these images wash over the reader, unfurling in comma-rich sentences that beautifully render a state of inertia -- Francesca Carington * Daily Telegraph *
Sea Monsters is a mesmerizing, revelatory novel, smart and funny and laced with a strangeness that is never facile but serves as a profound and poetic tool for navigating our shared world. Chloe Aridjis is the rare writer who reinvents herself in each book; she is, for my money, one of the most brilliant novelists working in English today -- Garth Greenwell
A mesmerising novel Aridjis beautifully renders the perspective of a bored, intelligent, privileged teenage girl a decadent, solipsistic daydream -- Emily Rhodes * Financial Times *
Self-contained, inscrutable, and weirdly captivating, like a salvaged object that wants to return to the sea -- Katy Waldman * New Yorker *
Aridjis riffs like a poet, letting each image twist and grow into the next... The novels strength lies in its ability to turn to the next magic trick, the next detail, the next sight. Those sights are all the more impressive when conjured solely from language. By opting out of fictions conventional prioritization of plot or character development, Aridjis foregrounds her ability to develop images and metaphors. The result is seductive in its multiplicity. Mallarm would be proud -- Lily Meyer * Atlantic *

Author Bio

Chloe Aridjis was born in New York and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico. She is the author of two previous novels, Book of Clouds, which won the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger in France, and Asunder. Chloe writes for various art journals and was a guest curator at Tate Liverpool. In 2014 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in London.