The pisces

Lucy has spent nine years failing to finish her doctoral dissertation on Sappho, and when a half-hearted suggestion that she and her boyfriend "take a break" ends their relationship for good, she spirals. She decamps to her sister's glass house in Venice Beach to dog-sit a diabetic dog and, at her sister's insistence, joins a therapy group for women addicted to love and sex — all while circling an ever-widening void of despair.

Then, one night on the beach, she meets Theo: young, beautiful, unhurried, and unlike any man she has dated. Their connection is instant and consuming — until Lucy discovers that Theo is a merman, and that loving him means surrendering to something as dangerous as it is intoxicating.

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, Melissa Broder's The Pisces is a darkly funny, sexually frank, and unsettling novel about desire, depression, and the seductive pull of oblivion — a myth-tinged story that stares straight into the emptiness at the centre of longing.