In the near future, a young woman finds her mother’s body starfished on the kitchen floor in Queens and sets out on a journey through language, archives, artificial intelligence, and TV for a way back into herself. She begins to translate an old manuscript about a group of female medical students beset by a drought and living at the edge of a war as they create a new way of existing to help the people around them. As she works on the translation, her life and the manuscript become entangled.
Later, the arrival of a childhood friend, a stranger, and an unusual AI project force her to question her own moral compass. How involved are we in the suffering of others? What does real compassion look like? How do you make a better world?
Written in vivid and pulsating prose that alternates between the young woman’s life and passages of the translated manuscript, Akil Kumarasamy’s Meet Us by the Roaring Sea is a remarkable, genre-bending exploration of memory, technology, friendship, love, consciousness, and the costs of caring for others in an age when we are caught within the swamps of our own minds.
