“E. Lily Yu’s finely honed prose and her child narrator allow for flashes of warmth and beauty between the shocks and sorrows, the terrors and humiliations.”
“On Fragile Waves is a masterful and poetic novel about finding hope and joy in the most dire circumstances.”
Available Now / $25.95 / 288 pages
The haunting story of a family of dreamers and tale-tellers looking for home in an unwelcoming world.
Firuzeh and her brother Nour are children of fire, born in an Afghanistan fractured by war. When their parents, their Atay and Abay, decide to leave, they spin fairy tales of their destination, the mythical land and opportunities of Australia.
As the family journeys from Pakistan to Indonesia to Nauru, heading toward a hope of home, they must rely on fragile and temporary shelters, strangers both mercenary and kind, and friends who vanish as quickly as they’re found.
When they arrive in Australia, what seemed like a stable shore gives way to treacherous currents. Neighbors, classmates, and the government seek their own ends, indifferent to the family’s fate. For Firuzeh, her fantasy worlds provide some relief, but as her family and home splinter, she must surface from these imaginings and find a new way.
This exquisite and unusual magic realist debut, told in intensely lyrical prose by an award winning author, traces one girl’s migration from war to peace, loss to loss, home to home.
Biography
E. Lily Yu is a writer and narrative designer whose fiction has appeared in places such as McSweeney's, Boston Review, Clarkesworld, F&SF, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year.
Praise for On Fragile Waves
“On Fragile Waves is a lyrical fabulist novel that will enchant readers of both literary fiction and fantasy.” —Booklist ★
“In flowing, lyrical prose, Yu showcases the power of folklore and the pain of displacement. This is a knockout." —Publishers Weekly ★
“Essential fiction to understand our world; Yu will draw in new fans while continuing to intrigue those who have read her for years.” —Library Journal ★
“A heartbreaking celebration of the necessity of joy. A soul-searing tale of homecoming, home-becoming, home-conjuring. By holding up the jagged beauty of faith against despair, E. Lily Yu is the brilliant voice of conscience our age needs.” —Ken Liu, author of The Paper Menagerie and The Grace of Kings
“A stunning heartbreaker. The prose is as sharp and beautiful as the story it tells. Firuzeh's world is at once fresh and familiar, like all the best fairy tales, bringing into painful beautiful focus all the ways the world is horrible, and all the ways the world is magic.” —Sam J. Miller, Nebula-Award-winning author of Blackfish City and The Art of Starving
“Vivid, intense and heart-wrenching. Combining a coming-of-age tale with an unflinching meditation on exile and migration, On Fragile Waves poignantly illustrates the devastating impact of abstract policies on actual people.” —Victoria Law, co-author of Prison By Any Other Name
"An incredibly accomplished debut novel, a necessary and important tale of empathy and imagination and hope." —Matt Bell, author of Appleseed