Sea Monsters

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 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

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

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

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 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

Ellen Jones, Los Angeles Review of Books

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