Cascade by Julia Hannafin
CASCADE BY JULIA HANNAFIN is a propulsive novel set on the Farallons—a rugged set of islands off the coast of San Francisco—about addiction, sex, gender, loss, and whether any of us can escape our biological inheritance. After her mother’s overdose, Lydia goes to work for her ex-boyfriend’s father tagging and monitoring great white sharks. As rare and unforeseen interactions between species threaten her team’s research, so does Lydia’s growing infatuation with her boss.
Born and raised in Berkeley, Julia Hannafin now lives in Los Angeles. They have written episodes for television. Cascade is her debut novel.
"Observing the longing and cruelty of animals as if to avoid consideration of her own grief, the protagonist of Cascade delivers an anti-bildungsroman which destroys conceptions of youthful transformation. The novel is a secret meditation on gender and addiction that refuses to be defined as such, its proscenium the ragged environmental beauty that Hannafin describes with the expert hand of a naturalist. Disguised as a harrowing and erotic page-turner, the book flashes with other revelations as briefly as the sharks it worships cut through dark water."
—Kathleen Alcott, author of America Was Hard to Find and Emergency
"I could feel the salt spray and smell the sea birds as I read Cascade. What a vivid and compelling depiction of a young woman's short but formative interlude on a stormy, austerely beautiful archipelago. Hannafin conveys both the dramas of the landscape and the dramas of their characters with great precision and beautiful imagery—I was captivated."
—Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility
”Cascade is an utterly captivating debut novel about the promise and bafflement of the body and the natural world. Placing the human in reverential but clear-eyed juxtaposition with the wild, Julia Hannafin evokes the work of writers as varied as Andrea Barrett, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, and Lauren Groff. The result is richly imagined, achingly beautiful, and wholly original: a story of desire, grief, and renewal that will also teach you the proper method for data-tagging sharks in open water.”
—Justin Taylor, author of Reboot