Fish Tales: A Novel

A Best Book of the Year: Literary Hub • The Week
A Must-Read: The New York Times Book Review • Time • The Week • The Millions

“A masterpiece.” —Namwali Serpell, The New York Review of Books

A mesmerizing spin through the high-rolling high times of 1970s New York and Detroit, Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales is a lost classic taking its rightful place in the spotlight.

Confident and cavalier, Lewis Jones seeks freedom and a good time, leaving mayhem in her wake. Strutting between the bohemian demimonde of New York City and the affluent Black community of Detroit, she guzzles champagne, snorts piles of cocaine, wakes up on silk sheets with a variety of lovers. And then she is upended by the handsome, erudite, often cruel Brook—a man who has his own bevy of admirers. Soon, Lewis and Brook are ensnared in a struggle for dominance that launches them into a shock of violence.

A bold exploration of the blurred line between love and control, pleasure and addiction, Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales offers a glittering, devastating portrait of a woman’s pursuit of her own kind of freedom. As provocative as it is moving, as profane as it is artful, it illuminates the warring forces of power, desire, intimacy, and fear, and exposes the raw nerve of our yearning to be loved on our own terms.