On Fragile Waves
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 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, a seemingly 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, hope to home.
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Become an affiliateE. Lily Yu is the award-winning author of the novel On Fragile Waves (Erewhon, 2021), selected for best-of-the-year lists by NPR, Booklist, and Publishers Weekly, and Jewel Box: Stories (forthcoming from Erewhon, 2023), collecting the best from over a decade of short stories published in venues from McSweeney's to Vice. She received the Astounding Award for Best New Writer in 2012 and the Artist Trust LaSalle Storyteller Award in 2017, and has been a finalist for every major award in science fiction and fantasy. She has been writing essays in her newsletter, The Paper Airplane, since 2020. Most recently, she wrote the libretto for the short opera Stars Between (2021), produced as part of Seattle Opera's Creation Lab. Lily received an A.B. in English literature from Princeton, along with a certificate in biophysics, and a M.A. from Cornell.