Sea Monsters

Seventeen-year-old Luisa's narrative voice is wildly immersive and utterly believable, and her wry, keen-eyed cadence lends Sea Monsters its singular sense of the story's place and time in 1980s Mexico

Sea Monsters is a sharp story, one with heart, with punk and surrealist undertones; a sort of Mexican Weetzie Bat meets Eve Babitz's sense of place meets Knausgaard's autobiographical realism meets Elena Ferrante's gift for characters

The novel is inspired by a true… (more)

The novel is inspired by a true story; Aridjis ran away from home at age sixteen, and her father came looking for her; as such, the narrator feels intimate and fully formed, and her simultaneous teenage skepticism and buoyant, hopeful adventure-seeking is natural and addictive to read

Chloe Aridjis was born in New York and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico City; she received her B.A. from Harvard University in Cambridge, MA

The author has been compared by critics to Haruki Murakami, Walter Benjamin, and W. G. Sebald

Bookstores and readers across the country are hungry for narratives and perspectives that counteract the wall-building and border-closing agendas of the current American political administration; the success of writers like Luiselli and Herrera point to a thriving moment for Mexican and Mexican American literature; and as the author says of her impetus to write the novel, "I wanted to write about a time in Mexico when the harrowing drug violence had yet to cast a pall over the country, and young people felt free enough to enact their daydreams."

Of particular interest for independent booksellers: In 2015, Chloe was the guest curator of the Leonora Carrington exhibition at Tate Liverpool. She is also the daughter of Homero Aridjis (and the translator of his 2016 The Child Poet, from Archipelago)

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