Meet Us by the Roaring Sea: A Novel

"What happens when you braid a dystopic future and a conflict-ridden past together and then let it unfurl across multiple continents? You get Akil Kumarasamy’s second book. Exploring memory and language, reality and imagination, loss and grief, climate change and personal privacy, agency and accountability, this novel demands the kind of close reading that its unnamed protagonist, a Tamil-to-English translator, does with the historical text she’s translating. Employing the uncommon second-person and first-person plural points of view, Kumarasamy complicates our sense of intimacy and distance with her characters. An ambitious scope, but such capaciousness also allows for dynamic characters, ideas, histories and possibilities."