In-Store: Tyler Wetherall: Amphibian w/ Hannah Lillith Assadi

Event guidelines:

• All attendees are strongly encouraged to wear a face mask at all times.
• Tickets are limited to restrict capacity at our store, and each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/2rOONImke4Q
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Sissy is used to being on the outside. The new kid at school, in the West Country of England, she observes the other girls like they’re foreign creatures. At home, her troubled mother lets Sissy fend for herself.

But after Sissy fights a boy in the playground one day at school, she’s no longer alone. Thrown into a secret friendship with the charismatic, apparently fearless, Tegan, the unlikely pair grow so close they feel like one being, wrapped around each in bed at sleepovers, sending photographs to men they meet in the online chat rooms of the 1990s, and scaring each other with reports of the girls being snatched at night in their small town.

On the precipice of girlhood, Sissy learns there’s danger in both being desired and desiring too much. As past traumas return to haunt her and Tegan, and present-day threats circle ever closer, growing up seems like the only way out. But a “ritual” to beckon their womanhood has unintended consequences. In its aftermath, as Sissy’s make believe world bleeds into her daily life, she feels her body transforming into something strange and terrifying.

With deft notes of magical realism and a constant psychological acuity, Amphibian is a tender, haunting coming-of-age debut, about desire, precocity and the intensity of early friendships that have the power to upend our lives.

Tyler Wetherall is an author and journalist. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, and the Guardian, amongst others. Her first book, No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run, followed her childhood as the daughter of an international pot smuggler and federal fugitive. Amphibian is her debut novel, set in the West Country where she grew up. She now lives in Brooklyn with her husband.

Hannah Lillith Assadi, a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, is the author of Sonora, which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and The Stars Are Not Yet Bells, a New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022. Her third novel Paradiso 17, inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2026. She teaches at the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute.

Host or Publisher Books Are Magic