Debutiful

There’s a magic to the kind of book that teaches a reader to see the world through another person’s eyes. There’s a double-magic when books take us out of human seeing altogether. It’s a trick that transcends genres: both literary and speculative writers love the challenge of reaching for a foreign understanding. 

My novel The Sea-Glass Shore is about a family of selkies: seal-people who take off their skins to live a human life on land. To write it, I immersed myself in remarkable facts about seals. Their eyes change shape to focus both above and below the water. They have whiskers so sensitive to vibration, they can track a small fish in a murky current. I imagined how a person accustomed to the sensory world of a sea-dwelling hunter would transition to life on land. The selkie people in my story pick up currents in the wind instead of water. They read nearby people through the give-and-take of their breathing. 

On the days when I was trying to think like a seal, I became more conscious not only of what people said to me, but how they sighed when they said it. Reaching for non-human perspectives has helped me understand the powers and limits of human thinking, and maybe even push those limits. Here are eight more books that do the same.