Sea Monsters

The third novel from the inimitble Chloe Aridjis, one of the most taleneted and promising young writers in English today

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

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

A mesmerising novel… Aridjis beautifully renders the perspective of a bored, intelligent, privileged teenage girl — a decadent, solipsistic daydream

Self-contained, inscrutable, and weirdly captivating, like a salvaged object that wants to return to the sea

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. Mallarmé would be proud

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

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.

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

A surreal, captivating tale about the power of a youthful imagination, the lure of teenage transgression, and its inevitable disappointments . . . Aridjis allows her narrative to swell and recede like the sea, along with Luisa’s capacious imagination . . . Aridjis excels at writing a life lived in the borderlands between reality and fantasy... Moreover, the novel’s precocious teenage narrative voice is replete with sentences of rare beauty and power. I may start reading it again at once

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

Sea Monsters is destined to be a classic: a richly imaginative, reflective and mesmerising novel

Aridjis’s coming-of-age novel is rich in atmosphere, and there’s an undeniable charm to its dreamlike narrative

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.

The prose is mesmerising with strange and beautiful observations

A dreamy, fantastical novel packed with lush description

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

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.

At once precise and impressionistic, [Sea Monsters] sympathetically navigates between dreams and disillusionment, while preserving intact its deeply beguiling spell

Sea Monsters is a treasure chest of Luisa’s deftly curated visions

Aridjis draws the reader in with gorgeous and poignant descriptions of setting, essayistic digressions on history and art, and moody suggestions of violence. She’s like a dreamier W. G. Sebald, or Baudelaire set to a soundtrack of Joy Division and the Cure. Further, there’s a sense of playfulness in Aridjis that a lot of people trying to write this kind of fiction never achieve

Aridjis weaves into being a magical world of youthful daydreams and desires, and yet she never quite allows us to escape the other, less magical world lurking behind it

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 Tomás, 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

Asunder

Rich, strange and beguiling, the much-anticipated second novel from Book of Clouds author, Chloe Aridjis

I loved Chloe Aridjis's Book of Clouds so it was exciting to read her new novel, Asunder, which, in a story about art, guardianship, damage and philosophy, revealed again the deftness and depth of narrative understanding of this subtle and courageous writer.

Exhilarating… The novel wonderfully disobeys all conventional rules of realism and plotting, of show-don't-tell. Powerful and artful, Asunder works like a poem, pulling us into a labyrinthine sequence of connected images. By the end, it seems like an abstract painting, apparently defying narrative time. This all makes for rapturous and enraptured reading.

Strange, extravagant, darkly absorbing… This is a book about quietness and violence. There is a Nabokovian rhythm in Asunder's obsessive permutations, and in the novel's dance of fluttering life and slow decay. Her novel thrills with energy because of it.

Chloe Aridjis is crafting a poetics of the strange. To describe her novels as inconsequential is not to deny them substance, but to highlight their shadowy randomness, their pearlescent impressionism and the way in which they work by hints and cross-references... this is deft and shimmering fiction.

Aridjis has risen to the occasion with Asunder. Given that Asunder lacks a conventional plot, the fact that it is such an absorbing and moving book says much about Aridjis's skill as a writer. Her unusual imagery and lyrical style breathe life into this otherwise sombre story.

[A] stunningly good second novel... Aridjis's intelligent prose makes this slight story into something dramatic and affecting, completely coherent and oddly irresistible. It is a brilliant book.

Aridjis's writing is refreshingly escapist... Moreover, the novel itself has escaped from the strait-jacket of convential narrative and plot. This leaves Asunder free to devote itself to mood and atmosphere, in which it is highly successful. Reading Asunder offers an unusually absorbing experience. It is also an unusually enjoyable one.

Asunder exists with an intensity stronger than that of most novels. Reading it is absorbing and enlarging to the imagination

Set amidst the stillness of museums and the magic of indeterminate urban spaces, this is a subtly lyrical novel about the lasting seductions of art, the ubiquitous processes of decay -- and the surprising renewals that can come from these. Chloe Aridjis writes about sensations at the edges of perception, capturing experiences rarely included in fiction. A surprising sensibility and an effortlessly original voice

Marie, the narrator of this charming novel, has the ideal job for someone who likes a quiet life. She’s a guard at the National Gallery in London... but she’s starting to long for change. In a story this elegant, it had to be Paris where her shell will be cracked.

[A] fine, ghostly novel. Aridjis has admirably tight control over her themes throughout – fittingly, for a book about visual arts, its mise en scene feels meticulous – and this control permits the book to be discursive without ever feeling meandering. [A] wise and haunting book.

Lyrical and intense…lucid and captivating writing. Asunder is full of beautifully painted intricate detail yet also forms the canvas for an exploration of powerful wider themes

Eschewing a conventional narrative, this absorbing, episodic novel deceptively contains a crackling energy within its understated, artful prose

Chloe Aridjis’s anticipated follow-up to her debut, Book of Clouds, haunts and beguiles as much as its predecessor

Aridjis tells an improbable tale with enough details to give it authenticity, and to make her genuinely creepy story something thoughtful and original

This is an incredibly atmospheric novel, seen through the eyes of Marie, a consummate outsider

Aridjis is a fantastic new voice in fiction with a real gift for character and location

Set against London’s rain-soaked streets, it is an astute portrait of the alienation of urban life

A beautiful tale examining the processes of life

Eschewing a conventional narrative, this absorbing novel deceptively contains a crackling energy within its understated, artful prose

Chloe Aridjis was born in New York, and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico City. She received her DPhil in nineteenth-century French poetry and magic from Oxford, then lived in Berlin for five years. Her first novel, Book of Clouds, published in 2009, won the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger in France. She lives in London.

Marie’s job as a museum guard at the National Gallery in London offers her the life she always wanted, one of invisibility and quiet contemplation. But amid the hushed corridors surge currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belie their own fragility. There also lingers the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the warder who slipped and fell moments before reaching the suffragette Mary Richardson as she took a blade to one of the gallery’s masterpieces on the eve of the First World War. 
 
After nine years there, Marie begins to feel the tug of restlessness. A decisive change comes in the form of a winter trip to Paris, where, with the arrival of an uninvited guest and an unexpected encounter, her carefully contained world is torn apart.

Book of Clouds

A stunning debut novel inviting comparisons with Haruki Murakami and Paul Auster.

Chloe Aridjis has achieved something quite astonishing: a rethinking of one of our most complacent forms, the historical novel.... The writer she calls to mind is the Modernist Haruki Murakami, with his unsolved riddles and ultra-cool characters. It is a book that you press on friends

[An] exceptional debut novel.... a beautifully turned piece of writing of extraordinary assurance... As natural as breathing. Both vivid and dreamlike, at once very precise in its images and also enchantingly broad-brush atmospheric, this is a debut more captivating than any I've read in some time

The debut novel by the New York-born, now London-based, Aridjis comes highly recommended by literary heavyweights Paul Auster and Ali Smith, a choice emphasising both Aridjis's  transatlantic appeal and her literary sensibilities

A hypnotic first novel about a young Mexican gal in Berlin who stumbles into friendship with an eccentric historian and the madness that ensues. This book has the power of dreams and still hasn't left me

A stirring and lyrical first novel by a young writer of immense talent

A fresh and original voice...the book is a portrait of Berlin, a city famed for its richness and strangeness, hauntingly captured by Aridjis

A most unusual debut... An entirely refreshing portrait of young womanhood, it is unselfconscious, uncompromising, wholly authentic

This is a haunting debut with an individual, poetic slant

It is Paul Auster, only better... This is a whimsical, confident book sustained by offbeat charm and intelligence

Aridjis is an insightful observer of post-reunification Berlin... Her lyrical, restrained prose conjures a dream-like atmosphere that borders on magical realism.  This haunting debut is a significant and memorable addition to the literature of a troubling city

Influenced by magical realism and the cool prose of modernism, first-time author Chloe Aridjis takes the best from each

Chloe Aridjis was born in New York, and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico City. She studied for a BA at Harvard, and gained her DPhil in nineteenth-century French poetry and magic from Oxford University. She then spent five years in Berlin and now lives in London.

Tatiana, a young Mexican woman, is adrift in Berlin. Choosing a life of solitude, she takes a job transcribing notes for the reclusive Doktor Weiss. Through him she meets 'ant illustrator turned meteorologist' Jonas, a Berliner who has used clouds and the sky's constant shape-shifting as his escape from reality. As their three paths intersect and merge, the contours of all their worlds begins to change...

Chloe Aridjis

'Chloe Aridjis is a revolutionary who is quietly changing the whole novel form. She is mining the richest seam in the vast field of fiction and coming up with gold. Her radiantly lyrical and intelligent writing is thrilling to read.'

'Clandestine, compassionate, and ever so slightly off-kilter, Chloe Aridjis's magnificent sleight of hand reshuffles the novel and places before us a beautiful and mischievous magic lantern of a book that casts out a multitude of unforgettable scenes, while shining a steady granular light on the hidden depths of the human psyche.'

'The Shadow of the Object would be an immense achievement based on the strange, impressionistic beauty of its prose alone... [a] glowing, mythopoeic book... I can only concur with Aridjis’s many admirers that she is one of the boldest writers at work in English today.'

'In the world The Shadow of the Object brings to light – now sharply focused, now only uncertainly defined – Chloe Aridjis patiently layers signs and symbols into a resonant network. A beautiful, eerie, grief-haunted novel.'

'With The Shadow of the Object Aridjis cements her status as the laureate of the peripatetic — of all that’s serendipitous, strange, improbable and, for these very reasons, true.'

'There is a keen intelligence and an eerie sensuality to everything that Chloe Aridjis writes. Reading The Shadow of the Object is a little like entering a dream state. A subtly addictive and intensely atmospheric experience. You won’t want to wake up.'

'Lucid and fabulous, and it bites.'

'A wildly brilliant and beautifully crafted novel. By turns mesmerising, magical, elegiac and funny, it's utterly compelling, original and surprising. I devoured it.'

[An] enchanting new novel… Aridjis never allows her narrative to become surreal, but revels in the ‘marvellous real’. She creates a world full of wonder without indulging in the impossible

‘Aridjis is a virtuoso of the gorgeously written art novel… A digressive and symbolically rich meditation on the nature of storytelling, sparkling with zany detail’

'The book has an intense flavour that can only come from an author’s deep investment in their material… Aridjis has a way of telling a story that makes us believe. Even the most unusual details feel emotionally true — and that, surely, is the essence of fiction'

'A mesmerising work, infinitely subtle, elliptical, and spellbinding.'

'[An] extraordinary novel... Aridjis’s prose, like the magic lantern itself, is hypnotic, transportive'

'What marks out Chloe Aridjis as a novelist is her ability to create atmospheres and ambiences...The Shadow of the Object is another quiet triumph for Aridjis'

'One of our boldest writers' Deborah Levy 
 
A magnificent work of shadow-play and a meditation on desire, metamorphosis and mortality. 
Flora is visiting home in Mexico when the family dog leaps up and bites her hand. She winds up in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia and meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound. 
 
When things take an unexpected turn, Flora finds herself entrusted with an important mission. She returns to London, where she resumes her job polishing silver at a jewellery shop, and strikes up a strange friendship with Wilhelmina’s son, Max. As Flora dips in and out of her imagination, she is increasingly aware it’s not only the magic lantern that projects, and her perception of reality is subtly altered. 
 
‘One of the most brilliant novelists working in English today’ Garth Greenwell 
 
‘The politics of her prose is existential rather than anecdotal, as it was with Kafka’s’ Zadie Smith 
 
‘A subtle and courageous writer’ Ali Smith 
 
‘Chloe Aridjis is crafting a poetics of the strange’ TLS

Chloe Aridjis

Praise for The Shadow of the Object

'Chloe Aridjis is a revolutionary who is quietly changing the whole novel form. She is mining the richest seam in the vast field of fiction and coming up with gold. Her radiantly lyrical and intelligent writi ...

'Clandestine, compassionate, and ever so slightly off-kilter, Chloe Aridjis's magnificent sleight of hand reshuffles the novel and places before us a beautiful and mischievous magic lantern of a book that cas ...

'The Shadow of the Object would be an immense achievement based on the strange, impressionistic beauty of its prose alone... [a] glowing, mythopoeic book... I can only concur with Aridjis’s many admire ...

'Chloe Aridjis is a revolutionary who is quietly changing the whole novel form. She is mining the richest seam in the vast field of fiction and coming up with gold. Her radiantly lyrical and intelligent writi ...

'Clandestine, compassionate, and ever so slightly off-kilter, Chloe Aridjis's magnificent sleight of hand reshuffles the novel and places before us a beautiful and mischievous magic lantern of a book that cas ...

'The Shadow of the Object would be an immense achievement based on the strange, impressionistic beauty of its prose alone... [a] glowing, mythopoeic book... I can only concur with Aridjis’s many admire ...

'Chloe Aridjis is a revolutionary who is quietly changing the whole novel form. She is mining the richest seam in the vast field of fiction and coming up with gold. Her radiantly lyrical and intelligent writi ...

'Clandestine, compassionate, and ever so slightly off-kilter, Chloe Aridjis's magnificent sleight of hand reshuffles the novel and places before us a beautiful and mischievous magic lantern of a book that cas ...

'The Shadow of the Object would be an immense achievement based on the strange, impressionistic beauty of its prose alone... [a] glowing, mythopoeic book... I can only concur with Aridjis’s many admire ...

Books by Chloe Aridjis

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter