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The Pisces

by Melissa Broder

A summer between scholarship and sea-born fantasy

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Awards & Recognition

  • Award recognition

    Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

    Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

AlbakiReads Editorial

A summer between scholarship and sea-born fantasy

After a breakup, Lucy leaves Phoenix for Los Angeles to dog-sit while her sister is away. Her dissertation on Sappho, anxiety, a love-addiction therapy group, and dating-app encounters frame a summer shaped by isolation and her growing fixation on a mysterious swimmer. The mermaid premise brings myth into contact with contemporary questions about desire and attachment: as Lucy learns more about the swimmer, she also has to reconsider her ideas about love and meaning. The book combines an everyday setting on Venice Beach with a fantastical relationship, keeping emotional uncertainty and erotic obsession closely intertwined.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in contemporary fiction about relationships, desire, and attachment.
  • Readers drawn to stories that mix everyday life with mythology or fantasy.
  • Readers curious about a protagonist whose scholarship on Sappho intersects with her personal life.

Themes

Love and obsessionAnxiety and attachmentSappho and mythFantasy in contemporary lifeMeaning and desire

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

"Bold, virtuosic, addictive, erotic - there is nothing like The Pisces. I have no idea how Broder does it, but I loved every dark and sublime page of it." --Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter


Lucy has been writing her dissertation on Sappho for nine years when she and her boyfriend break up in a dramatic flameout. After she bottoms out in Phoenix, her sister in Los Angeles insists Lucy dog-sit for the summer. Annika's home is a gorgeous glass cube on Venice Beach, but Lucy can find little relief from her anxiety -- not in the Greek chorus of women in her love addiction therapy group, not in her frequent Tinder excursions, not even in Dominic the foxhound's easy affection.

Everything changes when Lucy becomes entranced by an eerily attractive swimmer while sitting alone on the beach rocks one night. But when Lucy learns the truth about his identity, their relationship, and Lucy's understanding of what love should look like, take a very unexpected turn. A masterful blend of vivid realism and giddy fantasy, pairing hilarious frankness with pulse-racing eroticism, THE PISCES is a story about falling in obsessive love with a merman: a figure of Sirenic fantasy whose very existence pushes Lucy to question everything she thought she knew about love, lust, and meaning in the one life we have.
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