Perfect for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney, Methuselah offers a raw and haunting glimpse into our collective lonelinesses, anxieties, and desires.
Told in alternating chapters that braid the past with the near-present, Methuselah follows Tessa as she shuns college and sets out on the road with her doom metal band, a ragtag group called Pestilential Harbor.
But when she discovers that one of the members has been keeping an explosive secret, the band splinters. Tessa settles in San Diego, drifting through her twenties as love--and meaningful connections with other people--seems just out of reach.
As droughts and wildfires sweep her home state, she obsessively keeps tabs on the safety of a 4,000-year-old bristlecone pine tree named Methuselah (this means repeatedly pressing return on a Google search of "Is Methuselah still alive?"). But as her grandmother slides into dementia, and the natural world feels more distant than ever, it will take more than refreshing a webpage to keep Tessa's hope in the future alive.
Time folds in on itself, each chapter offering a new vantage point: from a hallucinogenic New Year's Eve party to a dust-white Bronx apartment to a ghost town in the Mojave Desert.
Methuselah is a meditation on time, memory, family history, and what it means to live in an increasingly fast-paced and disconnected world.
Praise
"Amy DeBellis writes with ferocious conviction for truth. This is what allows her fiction to unabashedly dissect the lives of her characters, peeling back skin and sinew to expose the raw underbelly of desire, insecurity, and rebellion. Methuselah is a masterful display of DeBellis' dedication to craft, which has enabled her to expertly construct a rich world of her own making-one that feels as authentic and troubled as the one we live in today."
- Nicholas Claro, author of This Is Where You Are: Stories
