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 GreenwellOne 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 that has recently escaped a Soviet circus touring Mexico. They head for Zipolite, the ‘Beach of the Dead’, a community peopled with 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 mesmeric, moving tale of adolescence, transgression and disenchantment. Sea Monsters offers an intoxicating portrait of Mexican youth culture in the late 1980s, a place of blinding sunlight and relentless rains. It is a poignant evocation of memory and buried secrets, the pull of fantasy colliding with the stark light of reality – a dreamlike yet vivid story of the moments and mysteries that shape us.