Notable Debuts
TMLS's Mohamed Ikhlef reviews two enticing debuts, one involving a tsunami survivor and one with talking worms.
Under Water by Tara Menon
Sometimes you read a novel so satisfying you want to press it into the hands of every passerby urging them to read it. For me, Tara Menon’s debut, Under Water, is exactly that.
Eight years after surviving the Indian Ocean tsunami, Marissa drifts through New York, her days unmoored and her nights spent in the beds of strangers as Hurricane Sandy gathers force offshore. From this charged present, the novel unfolds in a striking dual narrative moving seamlessly between the tense hours before the storm and the luminous days of her childhood on a small Thai island, where—after her mother’s death—she and Arielle forged a unbroken friendship, roaming forests and reefs and diving in perfect synchrony like the manta rays they named. All of it moves with quiet inevitability toward that precise moment on Boxing Day when the sea rises and tears them apart
Tara’s prose is vibrant and uncannily precise, every sentence feeling exactly right, every word carefully chosen. Marissa and Arielle are fully realized, their bond rendered with a brightness that lingers, making the coming rupture all the more devastating. It is a beautifully controlled, deeply affecting novel—one that pulls you under before you even know it. I, for one, cannot wait for her second novel.—Mohamed Ikhlef
Tara Menon website
The Oldest Bitch Alive by Morgan Day
Literature abounds with uncanny and strange narrators, yet nothing quite prepared me for The Oldest Bitch Alive, Morgan Day’s polyphonic novel where a chorus of voices unfolds—including, disturbingly, the worms consuming Gelsomina. a French bulldog, from within, changing her inner and outer world.
In a glass house shared with her owners, Wendy and John—an interior designer—and Zampano, a puppy meant to be her companion, Gelsomina becomes infested with two worms after drinking from the murky water of a nearby pond. On the brink of death yet teeming with new life, she comes to perceive the world anew: her bond with the designer-architect couple she lives with, the innocent distractions of their younger French bulldog, Zampanò, her longing for an elusive fox and the emptiness both within and beyond her. As time unfolds the gentle bulldog and the parasites inhabiting her alike are drawn into questions that have troubled philosophers for centuries: Who designed this life? Is there a plan? And am I free to live it as I choose?
The Oldest Bitch Alive is an uncommonly striking debut, one that offers not only an uncanny narrator but also shimmering, poetic prose. Its long, winding sentences feel at once dreamy and bizarre, pulling the reader into a world that is both disorienting and strangely intimate. This is a wild novel that invites us to think—and to see the world—from entirely new perspectives. And if you’re wondering: her next novel will be told by furniture.—Mohamed Ikhlef