Tara Menon in Conversation with Maria DiBattista on ‘Under Water: A Novel’

An intense, atmospheric novel about the devastating power of friendship, set against the backdrop of two cataclysmic events.

After Marissa loses her mother at six, the most intimate relationship of her life begins. Her marine biologist father, determined to channel his grief into completing his wife’s research, whisks her across the globe to Thailand. There she meets Arielle, and a fairy-tale friendship takes hold. During the week, the girls live at the resort owned by Arielle’s parents; on the weekends they join the tight-knit community of researchers on a nearby island. Together the girls discover the fragile wonders of its reefs, forests, and beaches. Together they learn to dive into the deep, holding their breath for minutes at a time, as effortlessly synchronized as the manta rays they come to know by name. Together they learn to swim their way out of danger. But then comes a wave Arielle can’t outpace, leaving Marissa gutted with loss.

Years later, Marissa is back in New York, adrift and haunted by the memory of her friend. Over the course of two fateful days, as another cataclysm approaches the city and the past comes flooding back, she discovers how to sustain herself in a precarious world.

Tara Menon is assistant professor in the Department of English at Harvard University. Her debut novel, Under Water, is newly published by Summit in the U.K. (March 12, 2026) and Riverhead in the U.S, (March 17, 2026). Her essays and reviews have appeared in publications including The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Sewanee Review, The Point, Bookforum, The Paris Review, and Public Books, where she co-edits the literary fiction section. Her academic work has appeared in Narrative, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, and Studies in the Novel. Her first academic monograph, Speaking & Parts: Conversation, Character, and Social Worlds, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in the fall of 2026.

Maria DiBattista is the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She specializes in 20th-century literature and film, the European novel and narrative theory. Her books include Virginia Woolf: The Fables of Anon, First Love: The Affections of Modern Fiction (Chicago, 1991), as co-editor and contributor, High and Low Moderns: British Literature and Culture 1889-1939 (Oxford, 1997), Fast Talking Dames (Yale University Press, 2003) and, Imagining Virginia Woolf (Princeton University Press, 2008).