Editions

Sea Monsters

Sea Monsters

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

Reviews

  • 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

    Daily Telegraph

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

    Financial Times

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

    New Yorker

  • 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

    Atlantic

More from this Author

About the Author

Chloe Aridjis

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.

Chloe Aridjis

Our Use of Cookies

We use cookies on this site to enable certain parts of the site to function and to collect information about your use of the site so that we can improve our visitors’ experience.

For more on our cookies and changing your settings click here

Strictly Necessary

Strictly Necessary cookies enable core functionality such as security, network management, and accessibility. You may disable these by changing your browser settings, but this may affect how the website functions. See More.

Analytics

Analytics cookies help us to improve our website by collecting and reporting information on how you use it. These cookies may be set by us or by third-party providers whose services we have added to our pages. See More.

Preferences & Features

Preference and Feature cookies allow our website to remember choices you make, such as your language preferences and any customisations you make to pages on our website during your visit. See More.

Targeting / Advertising

Targeting cookies are used to make advertising messages more relevant to you and your interests. They perform functions like preventing the same content from reappearing, ensuring ads are displayed and, in some cases, selecting content based on your interests. See More.