MONSTER IN THE MIDDLE

From the award-winning author of Land of Love and Drowning, an electric new novel that maps the emotional inheritance of one couple newly in love.

When Fly and Stela meet in 21st Century New York City, it seems like fate. He's a Black American musician from a mixed-religious background who knows all about heartbreak. She is a Catholic science teacher from the Caribbean, looking for lasting love. But are they meant to be? The answer goes back decades - all the way to their parents' earliest loves.

Vibrant and emotionally riveting, MONSTER IN THE MIDDLE moves from the U.S. to the Virgin Islands to Ghana and back again, to show how one couple's romance is intrinsically influenced by the family lore and love stories that preceded their own pairing. Yanique provocatively leads us through the early romantic pairings of Fly and Stela's respective parents, and through Fly and Stela's own formative years, to establish the foundation on which their relationship will sit. What challenges and traumas must they inherit, what hopes and ambitions keep them moving forward? Exploring desire and identity, religion and class, passion and obligation, the novel posits that in order to answer the question of 'who are we meant to be with?' we must first understand how we came to be.

This is an ambitious work about emotional inheritance - a genealogy of love - and how these narratives are handed down through families.

Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the award-winning novel Land of Love and Drowning, as well as the poetry collection Wife. Winner of the 2014 Center for Fiction First Novel award, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Award and a Fulbright scholarship. Pieces of MONSTER IN THE MIDDLE have been published in The New Yorker, and anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2020. Originally from the Virgin Islands, she now lives in Atlanta where she is a professor at Emory University.