Also of interest...in water creatures

Soundings by Doreen Cunningham (Scribner, $28)

This transportive memoir “portrays a world that is disappearing—melting away or transforming into something less hospitable,” said L.A. Taggart in the San Francisco Chronicle. Doreen Cunningham, an environmental journalist, relates two remarkable voyages she made following whales in Alaska and along North America’s western coast. She’s escaping a turbulent breakup when she mounts the second trip with her young son. On the ocean, she “finds an easier groove, and readers are richer for it.”

The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey (Knopf, $26)

“Vivid imagery, discussion-worthy themes, and a melding of history and magic” make this prize-winning novel a lively read, said Donna Edwards in the Associated Press. Named the 2020 Costa Book of the Year but only now widely available, it tells of a fisherman on a fictional Caribbean island who tries to save a mermaid. “A story of duality and curses,” it mixes Creole dialect and free-form verse, providing varying views on “what it is to be the oppressor, the oppressed, or something in between.”

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield (Flatiron, $27)

This eerie debut novel generates

“an exquisite—even sadistic—sense of suspense,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. Two married lovers, Leah and Miri, are stuck at home, with one nursing the other, a marine biologist who is mysteriously debilitated after surviving a deep-sea disaster. As the two alternate as narrators, “we only gradually become aware of how little we know,” and the novel “slithers from a love story to a Lovecraft story,” mixing dying love with gothic horror.

Voice of the Fish by Lars Horn (Graywolf, $16)

“Lars Horn is the mystic’s David Attenborough,” said Corinne Manning in The New York Times. In this “rapturous” book-length lyric essay, the British writer, who uses the pronoun “they,” looks to the creatures of the sea to argue for the limitlessness of being. An underlying personal narrative about an injury that left Horn motionless and speechless for months affirms the author’s intuition. “The body always adapts, the book argues,” proving as fluid as gender or a changing tide.