Description

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2019

‘Of all the books that I read this summer I think this was my absolute favourite. It really blew me away’ DOLLY ALDERTON

‘Frank, provocative and brilliant’ INDEPENDENT

‘Utterly mesmerising’ TATLER

‘Hilarious, poignant, sexy. A brilliant story about why we crave connection and how to find ourselves’ ELLE

‘Laugh-out-loud funny’ i

CHOSEN AS A SUMMER READ BY TATLER, THE TIMES, ELLE AND YOU MAGAZINE

Lucy has been writing her dissertation for nine years when she and her boyfriend have a dramatic break up. After she hits rock bottom, her sister in Los Angeles insists that Lucy dog-sit for the summer. Staying in a gorgeous house on Venice Beach, 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 dog’s easy affection. Everything changes when she 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.

Publisher Review

No one writes about love like Melissa Broder ... This is a book for every smart person who has made very bad decisions -- Melissa Febos, author of 'Abandon Me' Honestly, read this book and you'll be totally swept up in its brilliant writing and bizarre premise. You'll never look at the beach in quite the same way -- Unmissable Books to Read This Spring * Stylist * Broder is just as hilarious as she is wrenchingly honest * Elle Book Club * This book has my number so hard, I'm waiting for its midnight texts -- Amelia Gray, author of 'Isadora' Broder wraps timeless questions of existence - those that gods and stars have been beseeched to answer for millennia - in the weirdest, sexiest, and most appealing of modern packaging. Brilliant and delightful -- Starred Review * Booklist * A peerless combination of heartbreak and horniness, this novel's journey through the surreal throes of desire is a trip you'll want to take again and again -- Alissa Nutting, author of 'Made for Love' The characters in The Pisces are so finely drawn and palpably real. These are some of the most real, relatable merman sex scenes I have ever read in any book -- Megan Amram, comedian and writer of Parks & Recreation, Silicon Valley and The Good Place Melissa Broder has officially written the modern myth -- Molly Prentiss, author of 'Tuesday Nights in 1980' Sappho and Tinder, mermaid porn and nervous breakdowns, the banal and the bananas gloriously litter this uncanny marvel that is pretty impossible to put down -- Porochista Khakpour, author of 'Sick: A Memoir' Fearless writing, merrily mixing Sappho and bikini waxes, Greek myths and self-help, and with the most brutally honest sex scenes I've read in a long time -- Kerry Andrew, composer and author of 'Swansong' This book is for anyone that's wondered where their longing will take them next -- Chelsea Hodson, author of 'Tonight I'm Someone Else' Funny and dark, vicious and tender, The Pisces is a sexy and moving portrait of a woman longing for connection and pleasure in our strange and alienating world. I can't stop thinking about it -- Edan Lepucki, author of Woman No. 17 Bold, virtuosic, addictive, erotic - there is nothing like The Pisces. Between a broken-up Sappho academic and a Venice-beach merman, Melissa Broder miraculously captures everything absurd and pure about falling in love. I have no idea how Broder does it, but I loved every dark and sublime page of it -- Stephanie Danler, author of Bittersweet The Pisces has everything - devastating honesty about love, intimacy and loneliness, tonally perfect writing, propulsive plotting, laugh out loud hilarity, and genuinely hot sex with a merman -- Emily Gould, author of `Friendship' Fearless and perverted, full of desolation and of hope, The Pisces is a novel that delves head on into the many dark, absurd facets of human connection and coping in search of meaning and comes back bearing fantastic flashes of a twisted rom-com surreality only Melissa Broder's gemstone-studded brain could conjure up -- Blake Butler, author of 'There Is No Year' It's hot, it's fantastical, and it's snort-inducingly funny. I can't get enough of this book * Whimn * Melissa Broder lays herself bare but she does so with strength, savvy, and style. Above all, these essays are sad and uncomfortable and their own kind of gorgeous. They reveal so much about what it is to live in this world, right now -- Praise for 'So Sad Today', Roxane Gay If Melissa Broder weren't so fucking funny I would have wept through this entire book. Love, sex, addiction, mental illness and childhood trauma all join hands and dance in a circle, to the tune of Melissa's unmatched wit and dementedly perfect take on this terrifying orb we call home -- Praise for 'So Sad Today', Lena Dunham A triumph of unsettlingly relatable prose -- Praise for 'So Sad Today' * Vanity Fair * Her writing is deeply personal, sophisticated in its wit, and at the same time, devastating ... A portrait of modern day existence told with provocative, irreverent honesty -- Praise for 'So Sad Today' * Nylon * What separates Broder from her confessional cohort, as "filthy" (her word) as her pieces are, is that she doesn't seem to be out to shock, but to survive -- Praise for 'So Sad Today' * Elle *