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Imprint: Chatto & Windus
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Published: 07/02/2019
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ISBN: 9781784741938
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Length: 192 Pages
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Dimensions: 222mm x 22mm x 144mm
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Weight: 316g
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RRP: £12.99
Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award 2019
'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 Tomás, 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.
'A mesmerizing novel . . . Aridjis beautifully renders the perspective of a bored, intelligent teenage girl – a decadent, solipsistic daydream' Emily Rhodes, Financial Times
'A surreal, captivating tale about the power of a youthful imagination, the lure of teenage transgression, and its inevitable disappointments . . . Aridjis excels at writing a life lived in the borderlands between reality and fantasy . . . replete with sentences of rare beauty and power' Ellen Jones, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Imprint: Chatto & Windus
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Published: 07/02/2019
-
ISBN: 9781784741938
-
Length: 192 Pages
-
Dimensions: 222mm x 22mm x 144mm
-
Weight: 316g
-
RRP: £12.99
Reviews
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"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
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"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
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"A mesmerising novel… Aridjis beautifully renders the perspective of a bored, intelligent, privileged teenage girl — a decadent, solipsistic daydream"
Emily Rhodes, Financial Times
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"Self-contained, inscrutable, and weirdly captivating, like a salvaged object that wants to return to the sea"
Katy Waldman, New Yorker
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"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"
Lily Meyer, Atlantic
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"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
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"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
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"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
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"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"
Los Angeles Review of Books
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"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
