UNDER WATER

A woman navigates the aftermath of an earlier disaster as Hurricane Sandy bears down on New York City.

Marissa is in her 20s and working as an editorial assistant for a luxury travel magazine in Manhattan. A large part of her job consists of writing adjective-heavy copy for photographs in the Top Five series, inevitably including vacation destinations whose natural splendor and isolation remind her of the “tiny, uninhabited island in the Andaman sea” off the coast of Thailand where she grew up. In the wake of her mother’s death, her grieving father moved 6-year-old Marissa from New York to the island to continue his late wife’s research on manta ray reproduction. On her first week of school in Phuket, Marissa meets Arielle, a Thai British girl who quickly becomes closer to her than anyone in her life. Weekends and holidays, Arielle and Marissa live on the island and consider themselves “creatures of the sea,” like the manta rays whose individual identities they can recognize even from a distance. When school is in session, the girls haunt the kitchens of Arielle’s parents’ hotel and enact retribution on the predatory guests who flock to Thailand “in droves knowing they can have a woman for a price.” Then, on Dec. 26, 2004, the Indian Ocean tsunami hits their home, and everything changes. Seven years later, unable to live in the “ghost town” Phuket became after the tsunami, Marissa drifts through life, haunted by sorrow for what she has lost and incapable of imagining a future without the ghosts she carries within. Oscillating between the days leading up to the tsunami and the hours before Sandy hits New York in 2012, this debut novel tenderly and yet unflinchingly mines Marissa’s grief as it meditates on friendship, loss, and the shimmering beauty of memory—as ephemeral as the light that filters down through shallow ocean waters and just as enduring.

Stunning and complex; a book that admits no easy answers but also refuses to avoid the hard questions.