Sea Monsters

Description: '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 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 Tomas, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking - recklessness, impulse, independence - and may also help her fulfil an unusual obsession: to track down a troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs who have recently escaped a Soviet circus touring Mexico. 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 she wanders the shoreline, she begins to discover that a quest is more easily envisioned than accomplished. And so unfolds a phantasmagorical tale of adolescence, transgression and disenchantment in late 1980s Mexico, a place of long nights, insistent sun and relentless rain. Sea Monsters is an intoxicating evocation of past selves and buried histories, the pull of fantasy colliding with the stark light of reality - a dreamlike yet vivid novel about the moments and mysteries that shape us.

Review: "Self-contained, inscrutable, and weirdly captivating, like a salvaged object that wants to return to the sea" -- Katy Waldman * New Yorker * "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 "I love the way Chloe Aridjis creates her own worlds in prose, and I especially love how Sea Monsters has invented the world of adolescence and its reveries: violent and tender, logical and dreamlike - a twenty-first century essay disguised as a nineteenth-century fable" -- Adam Thirlwell "Eccentrically detailed...Aridjis scrambles your brain, not with high-modernist pyrotechnics but by the stealthier means of undermining the assumption that a novel's words exist to advance the story...You enjoy Luisa's company without ever being quite sure why she wants us around" -- Anthony Cummins * Observer * "Sea Monsters is destined to be a classic: a richly imaginative, reflective and mesmerising novel" -- Xiaolu Guo "A searingly hypnotic work, a dazzling tale of enchantment and disenchantment" -- Laura Esquivel, author of Like Water For Chocolate "Intense and impressionistic, it seems to hang on in the air long after the last page." -- Rupert Thomson "The language is precise, strange, evocative and wise... Aridjis's novel poses far more questions than it answers, and it does so accurately and beautifully." -- RO Kwon * Guardian * "Aridjis riffs like a poet, letting each image twist and grow into the next... The novel's 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 fiction's conventional prioritization of plot or character development, Aridjis foregrounds her ability to develop images and metaphors. The result is seductive in its multiplicity. Mallarme would be proud" -- Lily Meyer * Atlantic * "The novel's brilliance lies in capturing so convincingly that state of adolescent restlessness... Aridjis's 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 * "Reading this angsty and atmospheric novel was like busting open my adolescent 1980s veins and mainlining the entire Joy Division catalog right into my bloodstream. Just gorgeous" -- Samantha Irby * Marie Claire * "A dreamy, fantastical novel packed with lush description as Luisa recounts her first encounters with the darkly enrapturing Tomas, interchanged with scenes of her new life on the beach, where she becomes increasingly intertwined with others' lives" -- Jill Capeway * HuffPost * "Aridjis's coming-of-age novel is rich in atmosphere, and there's an undeniable charm to its dreamlike narrative" -- Anthony Gardner * Mail on Sunday * "A dreamy, wandering tale of teenage ennui and searching, and the pull of the sea . . . Aridjis's sentences are luminescent and imagistic . . . A lovely, surreal novel" -- Julia Kastner * Shelf Awareness * "The prose is mesmerising with strange and beautiful observations" * Sunday Express * "Ethereal and ruminative . . . Brilliant in her ability to get inside the head of her young narrator, Aridjis skillfully renders a slightly zonked-out atmosphere of mystery and the mind of a young romantic, resulting in a strange and hypnotic novel." * Publishers Weekly *


Author Biography: 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.