Meet Us by the Roaring Sea
By Akil Kumarasamy
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 23, 2022
In the near future, a young woman finds her mother’s body starfished on the kitchen floor in Queens and sets on a journey through language, archives, artificial intelligence, TV for a way back into herself. Along the way, she translates an old manuscript about a group of female medical students―living through a drought and at the edge of the war―as they create a new way of existence to help the people around them. In the process, the translator’s life and the manuscript begin to become entangled.
Soon, the arrival of a childhood friend, a stranger, and an unusual AI project will force her to question her own moral compass and sense of goodness. How involved are we in the suffering of others? What does real compassion look like? How do you make a better world?
Written in vivid and pulsating prose, alternating between her present life and passages of the translated manuscript, Meet Us by the Roaring Sea is a remarkable, genre-bending exploration of memory, technology, friendship, love, consciousness, and the costs of caring for others in an age where we are so often lost in the swamps of our own minds.
About the Author
Akil Kumarasamy is the author of the story collection Half Gods, which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an assistant professor at the Rutgers-Newark MFA program.