Sea Monsters

Sea Monsters

Summary

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
    Francesca Carington, Daily Telegraph

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.
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