NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF FALL 2021 BY:
NEW YORK TIMES ● VULTURE ● BOSTON GLOBE ● OPRAH DAILY
SHEREADS ● KIRKUS REVIEWS ● HEY ALMA ● LITHUB ● AND MORE
"Reveals on every page how love can persevere and take shape over time and space."--Boston Globe
"One of the most inventive and talented stylists of her generation." --Vulture
From the award-winning author of Land of Love and Drowning, an electric new novel that maps the emotional inheritance of one couple newly in love.
When Fly and Stela meet in 21st Century New York City, it seems like fate. He's a Black American musician from a mixed-religious background who knows all about heartbreak. She's a Catholic science teacher from the Caribbean, looking for lasting love. But are they meant to be? The answer goes back decades--all the way to their parents' earliest loves.
Vibrant and emotionally riveting, Monster in the Middle moves across decades, from the U.S. to the Virgin Islands to Ghana and back again, to show how one couple's romance is intrinsically influenced by the family lore and love stories that preceded their own pairing. What challenges and traumas must this new couple inherit, what hopes and ambitions will keep them moving forward? Exploring desire and identity, religion and class, passion and obligation, the novel posits that in order to answer the question "who are we meant to be with?" we must first understand who we are and how we came to be.
BIO
Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the award-winning novel Land of Love and Drowning, as well as the poetry collection Wife. Winner of the 2014 Center for Fiction First Novel award, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Award and a Fulbright scholarship. Her short fiction has been published in The New Yorker and anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2020. Originally from the Virgin Islands, she now lives in Atlanta, where she is a professor at Emory University.
REVIEWS
"Back and forth, through time and space, we examine the human propensity to love, to fail at loving, to love again.... On this tumultuous mapping of American magic, we find ourselves at the center. [ Monster in the Middle] boldly tells us: You are here." --The New York Times Book Review
"Tiphanie Yanique's Monster in the Middle is a compelling exploration of how we become who we are and how we manage to find our way to love. In her lyrical prose, the myriad possibilities of being--the accidents of birth, of sex, of race and geography, the choices we make, our compulsions--coalesce into something that feels, gloriously, like destiny." -- Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Memorial Drive
"Monster in the Middle is as boundless as it is affecting. Yanique's prose leaps with possibility, as her characters live and laugh and fight and love. Yanique captures romance from its peaks to its craters, deftly weaving whole worlds from everything in between."-- Bryan Washington, author of Memorial
[H] Riverhead Books / October 19, 2021
1.26" H x 8.9" L x 6.22" W (1.0 lbs) 288 pages