Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness
Jennifer Tseng
(Author)
21,000+ Reviews
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Description
PEN Award Finalist: “A sense of longing suffuses Tseng’s sexy, sad debut novel” about a librarian obsessed with a teenage boy (Kirkus Reviews).
Books may be Mayumi Saito’s greatest love and her one source of true pleasure. Forty-one years old, disenchanted wife and dutiful mother, Mayumi’s work as a librarian on a small island off the coast of New England feeds her passion for reading and provides her with many occasions for wry observations on human nature, but it does little to remedy the mundaneness of her life. That is, until the day she issues a library card to a shy seventeen-year-old boy and swiftly succumbs to a sexual obsession that subverts the way she sees the library, her family, the island she lives on, and ultimately herself.
“Jennifer Tseng delivers an elegant exploration of passion and its consequences while casting her observant eye on motherhood, memory, exile, and female friendship. Carnal, witty, and slyly crafted, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness is a sizzling fuse of a novel, with an explosion bigger and better than anything you can imagine.” —Sara Levine, author of Treasure Island!!!
“An uncannily apt elucidation of the way sadness can leave a person adrift, and how love can make even a very isolated person feel, momentarily, perhaps delusionally, less alone.” —Elle
Books may be Mayumi Saito’s greatest love and her one source of true pleasure. Forty-one years old, disenchanted wife and dutiful mother, Mayumi’s work as a librarian on a small island off the coast of New England feeds her passion for reading and provides her with many occasions for wry observations on human nature, but it does little to remedy the mundaneness of her life. That is, until the day she issues a library card to a shy seventeen-year-old boy and swiftly succumbs to a sexual obsession that subverts the way she sees the library, her family, the island she lives on, and ultimately herself.
“Jennifer Tseng delivers an elegant exploration of passion and its consequences while casting her observant eye on motherhood, memory, exile, and female friendship. Carnal, witty, and slyly crafted, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness is a sizzling fuse of a novel, with an explosion bigger and better than anything you can imagine.” —Sara Levine, author of Treasure Island!!!
“An uncannily apt elucidation of the way sadness can leave a person adrift, and how love can make even a very isolated person feel, momentarily, perhaps delusionally, less alone.” —Elle
Product Details
| Publisher | Europa Editions |
| Publish Date | May 26, 2015 |
| Pages | 232 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Digital (delivered electronically) |
| EAN/UPC | 9781609452780 |
About the Author
Jennifer Tseng’s first book The Man With My Face won the 2005 Asian American Writers' Workshop's National Poetry Manuscript Competition and a 2006 PEN American Center Open Book Award. Her second book Red Flower, White Flower, winner of the Marick Press Poetry Prize, features Chinese translations by Mengying Han and Aaron Crippen. Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness is her debut novel. She works at the West Tisbury Library on Martha’s Vineyard.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Reviews
Praise for Mayumi and The Sea of Happiness
"Mayumi’s trespasses and thrills are so deeply imagined that I lived her affair with her, cheering her even as I knew I would drown with her in her ecstasy. This book’s fierce physicality glitters beneath the surface of every heady sentence.”—Susanna Daniel, author of Stilsville and Sea Creatures
“Jennifer Tseng delivers an elegant exploration of passion and its consequences while casting her observant eye on motherhood, memory, exile, and female friendship. Carnal, witty, and slyly crafted, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness is a sizzling fuse of a novel, with an explosion bigger and better than anything you can imagine.”—Sara Levine, author of Treasure Island!!!
"This is a confession that reads like an exultation, and Mayumi’s gleeful admissions will likely keep the reader turning pages at the kind of speed that inspires papercuts.”—The Seattle Review of Books
“The love scenes don't lack for erotic description and detail, and Mayumi's obsessive admiration for the young man swings between coolly perceptive and discomfitingly overheated. But the precision and poetry of Tseng's writing keep the book from meandering too far in the direction [of pure romance]...Tseng explores time and place, isolation and connection, and veers more toward the lyrical than the lurid.”—Kirkus Reviews
"Mayumi’s trespasses and thrills are so deeply imagined that I lived her affair with her, cheering her even as I knew I would drown with her in her ecstasy. This book’s fierce physicality glitters beneath the surface of every heady sentence.”—Susanna Daniel, author of Stilsville and Sea Creatures
“Jennifer Tseng delivers an elegant exploration of passion and its consequences while casting her observant eye on motherhood, memory, exile, and female friendship. Carnal, witty, and slyly crafted, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness is a sizzling fuse of a novel, with an explosion bigger and better than anything you can imagine.”—Sara Levine, author of Treasure Island!!!
"This is a confession that reads like an exultation, and Mayumi’s gleeful admissions will likely keep the reader turning pages at the kind of speed that inspires papercuts.”—The Seattle Review of Books
“The love scenes don't lack for erotic description and detail, and Mayumi's obsessive admiration for the young man swings between coolly perceptive and discomfitingly overheated. But the precision and poetry of Tseng's writing keep the book from meandering too far in the direction [of pure romance]...Tseng explores time and place, isolation and connection, and veers more toward the lyrical than the lurid.”—Kirkus Reviews
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