Emily Habeck

A New York Times Editors’ Choice
A USA TODAY Bestseller
A Booklist Editor’s Choice
A Goodreads Choice Award Nominee
A Massachusetts Book Awards Fiction Honors Selection
Shortlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize

A “beautifully written” (Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All the Light We Cannot See) debut novel of marriage, motherhood, metamorphosis, and letting go, this intergenerational love story begins with newlyweds Wren and her husband, Lewis—a man who, over the course of nine months, transforms into a great white shark.

For Lewis and Wren, their first year of marriage is also their last. A few weeks after their wedding, Lewis receives a rare diagnosis. He will retain most of his consciousness, memories, and intellect, but his physical body will gradually turn into a great white shark. As Lewis develops the features and impulses of one of the most predatory creatures in the ocean, his complicated artist’s heart struggles to make peace with his unfulfilled dreams.

At first, Wren internally resists her husband’s fate. Is there a way for them to be together after Lewis changes? Then, a glimpse of Lewis’s developing carnivorous nature activates long-repressed memories for Wren, whose story vacillates between her childhood living on a houseboat in Oklahoma, her time with her college ex-girlfriend, and her unusual friendship with a woman pregnant with twin birds. Woven throughout this “heart-wringing” (Adam Roberts, internationally bestselling author of Salt) novel is the story of Wren’s mother, Angela, who becomes pregnant with Wren at fifteen in an abusive relationship amidst her parents’ crumbling marriage. In the present, all of Wren’s grief eventually collides, and she is forced to make an impossible choice.

A sweeping love story that is at once lyrical and funny, airy and visceral, Shark Heart is an unforgettable, gorgeous novel about life’s perennial questions, the fragility of memories, finding joy amidst grief, and creating a meaningful life. This daring debut marks the arrival of a wildly talented new writer abounding with originality, humor, and heart.

A Love Story

Shark Heart

Pedro Rodarte

Wren saw now how passion was delicate and temporary, a visitor, a feeling that would come and go. Feelings fled under pressure; feelings did not light the darkness. What remained strong in the deep, the hard times, was love as an effort, a doing, a conscious act of will. Soulmates, like her and Lewis, were not theoretical and found. They were tangible, built.

Emiley Jones

Joy, with her ancestors residing within her like nesting dolls, is a brave, flaming heart born to face the wound of the world and one day, she will be one among the wave to heal it.

Her routine was even, predictable, and managed. She would do almost anything to protect her ordinariness. (…) Some might consider her life boring, but boring missed the point. She was unshakable.

fear, sadness, and rage were worthwhile experiences rather than things to smile through or tuck away.

smile??

I don't want to wake up. I like to think we met in a daydream once, a long time ago, and decided to meet right here, right now.

By the time they were engaged, Wren thought she had vanquished her fear of love and commitment. She had never felt so free and happy. But marriage awakened a new and unexplainable anxiety. [...] It wasn't Lewis as a person, the depth of her love, or the fact of their commitment that disturbed her. It was that she knew how easily they could fail each other.

Lewis had taken procrastination to its limit. Later was no longer a dependable place. He did not have decades to make theater worth remembering, to birth a reality that people would cherish in times beyond him. The best he had to offer anything was right now. And maybe that had always been true.

[...] the only thing more terrifying than seeing his future through his own eyes would be seeing it through hers.

Shark Heart quotes

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