Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl
Regular price
€19.99
A01=Mandy-Suzanne Wong
animal rights
Author_Mandy-Suzanne Wong
Category=DNL
Category=DS
environmental
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
invertabrate
jellyfish
Mollusks
nature
sea creatures
shellfish
slugs
snails
starfish
Product details
- ISBN 9781644453735
- Weight: 220g
- Dimensions: 140 x 210mm
- Publication Date: 16 Mar 2026
- Publisher: Graywolf Press,U.S.
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl collects Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s reminiscences, dreams, investigations, and experiments in being with small invertebrates whose vulnerability and creativity inspire radical reimaginings of Earthlinghood. In graceful linked essays, Wong wonders: What constitutes a self if a starfish can twist off one of his arms to explore the seafloor on its own? What is an animate being, considering a living snail is also an inanimate shell? What does love mean to a jellyfish, or time to an octopus? Her encounters with nonhuman animals reshape her language into different forms from collage to fragments, and prompt uncommon engagements with various texts. She looks behind words like “invasive” and “endling” in scientific articles and in poetry, questions natural selection with a bubble-rafting snail, sees the bivalve in Dostoevsky, and studies a speculative treatise about a “vampire squid from hell.”
Personal yet de-personal, at once tender and challenging, Wong’s essays invite humans to rethink our relationship to other beings. Instead of capturing and destroying them, using them as resources or reflections of ourselves, she asks us only to coexist with them—to cherish them although, and because, we cannot fully know them.
Mandy-Suzanne Wong is a Bermudian writer of fiction and essays. Her books include the novel The Box, shortlisted for the US/Canada Republic of Consciousness Prize, the novel Drafts of a Suicide Note, and the fiction chapbook Awabi.
