The Pisces

Hip, smart, incisive, neurotic, sexually-explicit, oddly romantic, gross in places, startlingly intellectual in others - Broder's novel is absolutely contemporary and while it reaches out to the work of Lena Dunham and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, amongst others, it also has a unique personality and individuality of its own.

Our cast-adrift heroine is 38 and in between Tinder hook-ups, the women's group meetings, and agonising about her lost boyfriend, she's writing a long-overdue PhD thesis about the spaces in Sappho's poetry - and this image of nothingness and how we decide to fill it is what gives the book both a kind of coherence as well as some emotional and intellectual heft.

Into this hiatus comes Theo - a beautiful merman! - and it's to Broder's credit that the whimsy fits in right along with the other elements of Lucy's life; indeed, musing about the Homeric sirens of Greek mythology as mermaids, ties Theo more thematically to everything else than we might expect.

With due attention to the female body in all its physicality - from sex to sexual infections, from pee to menstrual blood - Broder is bold and sometimes dark in her refusal to be 'nice'. I enjoyed this hugely both for its re-writing of the tropes of chick-lit and its cognate genres of 'women's writing', as well as its sheer exuberant delight in storytelling. Who knew mixing modern female existential angst with a sexy merman would be so potent? Brava, Ms Broder - I'm putting my money on this as one to watch in 2018. Oh, and such a wonderful offbeat cover!

Fucked up humans, a merman, Dominic the diabetic dog, Sappho… Life certainly is a box of chocolates for Lucy, a PhD student who breaks up with her boyfriend and heads to LA to dog-sit for her sister for a couple of months. There she joins a love addiction therapy group of women, swipes right on some dickheads and meets a sexy dude hanging out my the rocks.

I loved The Pisces because it’s so much about the reality we inhabit with all its weird connected disconnection and so much about the fantasy that we create to avoid that reality. It’s brutal in places, hilarious in others and sometimes it’s so close to the bone you have to put it down. Well, it’s all that plus hot merman sex.

Bananas and beautiful in the very best way, like a Miranda July film. Somebody make this into a film.