Showing results for "Mermaids" in Magical Realism

Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction “Wonderful… completely transporting.” —Madeline Miller, New York Times bestselling author of Circe and The Song of Achilles ""Historical fiction at its finest, combining myth and legend with the brutal realities of the past...

They say Mackerel Sky was founded when Captain Burrbank first saw Nimuë the mermaid and forgot the sea. Stricken by love, he moored his tall ship and made camp on the highest cliff, hoping to forever gaze upon her beauty. That camp became a settlement, the settlement a town, the town a community both blessed and cursed by their tempestuous affair.

Moored in a coastal fishing town so far north that the highways only run south, the unnamed narrator of The Seas is a misfit. She's often the subject of cruel local gossip. Her father, a sailor, walked into the ocean 11 years earlier and never returned, leaving his wife and daughter to keep a forlorn vigil. Surrounded by water and beckoned by the sea, she clings to what her father once told her: that she is a mermaid.