The true tale of how one woman’s lifelong obsession became a midlife mermaid odyssey, from the irrepressibly witty author of Tinderbox and Things I Learned at Art School. Forty, freckled and facing infertility, writer and disgruntled project manager Megan Dunn hears the siren call that reawakens her lifelong obsession and sets off in pursuit of mermaids. Real mermaids. From Coney Island and Copenhagen to Courtenay Place, Wellington, New Zealand; from Waterhouse’s classic painting A Mermaid to the 1984 romantic comedy Splash to Skyping the first freelance mermaids of the new millennium, her odyssey takes her fathoms deep to strange and unlikely places, probing the collective unconscious and asking the question that has plagued humans for millennia- What is it about mermaids? Diving into the caves of her own life, Megan loses the plot but finds her voice and hears the mermaids singing. Shimmeringly intellectual and devastatingly deadpan, tragicomic and true, The Mermaid Chronicles is an off-the-hook tale about sex and marriage, mothers and daughters, middle age, women’s work, obsession, the stories we tell ourselves and the myths that define us all. (And Daryl Hannah, too.)
