Sea Monsters

Sea Monsters is a novel by the Mexican-British writer Chloe Aridjis, published in 2019. It is set in Mexico at the end of the 1980s and is based in part on the author's own teenage years.

Luisa is bored, watchful and in search of something she cannot name. The travelling dwarf troupe is the object of a private obsession, and the boy she takes with her is a means of getting away from her family and a reason in himself, since he is reckless in a way that she finds compelling and cannot manage.

Their destination is Zipolite, a beach on the Pacific coast that has collected hippies, nudists, beachcombers and people with stories, and it is there that Luisa looks for somebody who will promise never to be explained. What she finds is the difference between wanting an adventure and being in the middle of one, along with the long nights, the heat and the rain of a place that does not care what she was looking for. The novel is told in retrospect, by a narrator who knows how the summer ended and what it was worth.