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On the grounds of a Caribbean island resort, newlyweds Deb and Chip - our opinionated, skeptical narrator and her cheerful jock husband who's friendly to a fault - meet a marine biologist who says she's sighted mermaids in a coral reef.
As the resort's "parent company" swoops in to corner the market on mythological creatures, the couple joins forces with other adventurous souls, including an ex–Navy SEAL with a love of explosives and a hipster Tokyo VJ, to save said mermaids from the "Venture of Marvels," which wants to turn their reef into a theme park.
Mermaids in Paradise is Lydia Millet's funniest book yet, tempering the sharp satire of her early career with the empathy and subtlety of her more recent novels and short stories. This is an unforgettable, mesmerizing tale, darkly comic on the surface and illuminating in its depths.
"Starred Review. An admirable example of a funny novel with a serious message that works swimmingly. Dive in." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. With equal parts calculated wryness and pleading earnestness, she delivers a thrilling piece of fabulist fiction." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Brilliant and wildly funny, with well-placed sharp jolts of sobering reality; Pulitzer Prize finalist Millet is pure genius." - Library Journal
"I laughed so hard all over town… leave it to Lydia Millet to capsize her human characters in aquamarine waters and upstage their honeymoon with mermaids. I am awed to know there's a mind like Millet's out there - she's a writer without limits, always surprising, always hilarious." - Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove
"Mermaids in Paradise makes brilliant comedy out of a honeymoon trip that veers from the absurd to the sublime and back again. Lydia Millet is a stone-cold genius." - Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation
This information about Mermaids in Paradise was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
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Photo: Ivory Orchid Photography
Lydia Millet has written more than a dozen novels and story collections. Her novel A Children's Bible was a New York Times "Best 10 Books of 2020" selection and shortlisted for the National Book Award. In 2019 her story collection Fight No More received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. She also writes essays, opinion pieces, book reviews, and other ephemera and has worked as an editor and staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity since 1999. She lives in the desert outside Tucson with her family.
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