whale

Fiction Center Debut Award Finalist. Women's Prize for Fiction Finalist. “Brave, witty, thrilling, and gripping—there's nothing quite like The Whale. I don't know how Bruder does things, but I loved every dark, majestic page.” (Stephanie Danler, author of Bittersweet.) Lucy had been working on her dissertation on Sappho for nine years when she and her boyfriend broke up in a dramatic fight. Having hit rock bottom in Phoenix, her sister in Los Angeles insisted that Lucy dog-sit all summer. Annika's house is a gorgeous glass cube on Venice Beach, but Lucy finds little relief from her angst—not in the choir of Greek women in her love addiction therapy group, not in her frequent Tinder trips, not even in the easy affections of Dominic the beagle. Everything changes when, while sitting alone on the beach rocks one night, Lucy becomes smitten with a strangely attractive swimmer. But when Lucy discovers his true identity, their relationship, and her understanding of love, takes an unexpected turn. A masterful blend of vivid realism and joyful imagination, combining hilarious candor with fast-paced suspense, "The Whale" is about falling obsessively in love with a mermaid: a figure of Sirenike's imagination, whose presence forces Lucy to question everything she thought she knew about love, lust, and the meaning of the only life we ​​live.