Under Water by Tara Menon

Published by Riverhead Books on March 17, 2026

Under Water is a story of friendship and loss. In the present (2012), Marissa lives in New York. In the past (2004), Marissa lived in Thailand. The chapters alternate between the two years. Although the action in each location unfolds over a couple of days, Marissa’s first-person narrative fills in the essential background of her life.

Marissa was born to parents who grew up in New York but met in the Philippines. Her mother, a marine biologist, died in a car accident when she was six. After her death, Marissa's father accepted an invitation to stay with one of her mother’s colleagues, Rosalind Watkins, on an uninhabited island near Phuket where she set up a research station to study manta rays. Her father managed the lab, supervised visiting grad students, and did some cooking.

Marissa’s best friend was Arielle, whose wealthy mother was gifted a hotel in Phuket when she married a man of limited means. Marissa and Arielle developed the kind of intense friendship that is a phenomenon of youth. Both girls loved the water. They spent most of their days swimming with manta rays, but Marissa likes to party in Phuket on the weekends. Arielle would prefer to stay on the island but usually agrees to join Marissa in Phuket.

Water and death are pervasive themes. The story in both time frames is filled with wet weather and allusions to natural disasters around the world. The story’s bookends are wet weather events — a tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004, Hurricane Sandy in New York in 2012.

In Marissa’s world, water seems to symbolize both life and death. The ocean is alive with fish and coral, but by 2012, ocean life is starting to die. Arielle is alive in 2004 but appears only in Marissa’s memory in 2012. The specifics of her death are revealed late in the novel but often foreshadowed, so the reader knows that Arielle will drown. Marissa will spend the next years blaming herself because Arielle would still be alive if Marissa had not insisted that they spend the weekend in Phuket.

Tara Menon’s vivid descriptions of the tsunami and its aftermath are so chilling in their realism that I wondered whether she had herself survived one. She grew up in Singapore, so she at least has personal experience with tropical storms. The novel’s convincing portrayal of the chaotic environment in Phuket during the tsunami contributes to its power.

The New York story explores the impact Arielle’s death had on Marissa. She works as a copy editor and exists as a loner. She regularly picks up men for sex but not if they approach her before she invites the approach. Perhaps Marissa suffers from PTSD, but when she looks up the symptoms, Facebook begins to display targeted ads for aromatherapy and gravity blankets. The Facebook experience is one of many small moments that help the reader connect with Marissa’s life.

The story usually moves quickly, but Menon spends too much time dispensing facts about manta rays in Thailand and quaker parrots in Central Park. A lengthy list of fish that Marissa sees while swimming is a bit too tedious to stand as a worthwhile contribution to the novel’s atmosphere.

Fortunately, Menon finds more effective ways to help the reader visualize life in Thailand. She riffs on the thousand daily changes of color in the ocean and explains why Homer never used “blue” to describe the sea. Her most interesting riff explores the notion that climate change is imagined as a catastrophic event, when “most of the time devastation is quiet, subtle, humdrum.” Reefs gradually turn white as coral dies; populations of fish slowly thin. Nothing happens that humans regard as dramatic until until humans start to die.

But the novel is not a political tome about global warming. It is a very personal account of friendship, loss and regret. Although much of the story lives in Marissa’s memory, Menon keeps it in motion and steadily builds momentum until it reaches its climax. The moving aftermath slows the pace, giving the reader time to process the emotions that Menon sparks. This is a nicely crafted work of literature and, as a debut novel, a promising start to a career.

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