Amphibian

“I absolutely love this book. Haunting and visceral as a fairytale, Amphibian captures girlhood in all its feral, mythic glory and horror. Sissy and Tegan have a place in my heart—Lilly Dancyger, author, First Love

“In her debut novel, Tyler Wetherall mines the strange depths of female friendship for all of its traumatic treasure. Rarely have I felt so viscerally transported back in time as I did while reading this beautiful and haunting book. Gorgeously written and magically dressed, Amphibian resurrected for me the exquisite and ecstatic pains of girlhood.”—Hannah Lillith Assadi, author, The Stars Are Not Yet Bells

“It was something special to exist in the world of this book. Amphibian captures the contradictions of adolescence: the fear of and ache for change, the repulsive and joyful explorations of one’s body, the need for protection and the urge to break free. In this exhilarating and visceral story, the final years of make-believe collide with the early years of real world consequences. In Wetherall’s insistence on peering into all the dark corners of adolescence, she is able to do something quite profound: rightfully dignify the experience of girlhood. I will be thinking about these characters and this story for a long time.”—Allison Behringer, award-winning narrative audio journalist and creator of Bodies podcast

“Tyler Wetherall is a fine writer and a great storyteller. Her debut novel is unlike anything else I have read. As a tale of childhood friendship, it brims with sex and violence and threat, and moves to a crescendo of strange and magical beauty. I recognized the strangeness of my own girlhood in it, and I am sure that other readers will do the same. Amphibian will stay with me for a long time. Tyler’s art is to weave together a weight of observatory realist detail with the surreal—what Elizabeth Bishop called the ‘surreality of the everyday.’ The result here is terrific.”—Rebecca Stott, Costa Award winning author of In the Days of Rain

Sissy is used to being on the outside. The new kid at school, in the West Country of England, she observes the other girls like they’re foreign creatures. At home, her troubled mother lets Sissy fend for herself.

But after Sissy fights a boy in the playground one day at school, she’s no longer alone. Thrown into a secret friendship with the charismatic, apparently fearless, Tegan, the unlikely pair grow so close they feel like one being, wrapped around each in bed at sleepovers, sending photographs to men they meet in the online chat rooms of the 1990s, and scaring each other with reports of the girls being snatched at night in their small town.

On the precipice of girlhood, Sissy learns there’s danger in both being desired and desiring too much. As past traumas return to haunt her and Tegan, and present-day threats circle ever closer, growing up seems like the only way out. But a “ritual” to beckon their womanhood has unintended consequences. In its aftermath, as Sissy’s make believe world bleeds into her daily life, she feels her body transforming into something strange and terrifying.

With deft notes of magical realism and a constant psychological acuity, Amphibian is a tender, haunting coming-of-age debut, about desire, precocity and the intensity of early friendships that have the power to upend our lives.

Tyler Wetherall is a journalist and author. Her first book, No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run (St. Martin’s Press, 2018), followed her childhood as the daughter of an international pot smuggler and federal fugitive. The Washington Post called it, “a luminous memoir that no one who reads it will soon forget.” As a journalist, her work has appeared in The Guardian, National Geographic, Vice, and Condé Nast Traveler, amongst others, and her essays have been published in The New York Times’ ‘Modern Love’, LitHub, Narratively, and Marie Claire Australia. Her short fiction has appeared in The Gettysburg Review and Brooklyn Vol. 1. Raised in the U.K., she now lives in Brooklyn with her husband.