A woman's life and marriage are upended when her husband undergoes a Kafkaesque transformation in Emily Habeck's strikingly poetic, deeply moving first novel, Shark Heart. Newlyweds Wren and Lewis expect to have a long, happy marriage until Lewis notices his nose has grown spongy. The doctor diagnoses him with a Carcharodon carcharias mutation, a condition that will cause Lewis to transform into a great white shark and require relocation to the ocean. Practical, no-nonsense Wren reacts by commenting that the first year of a marriage is the hardest, "a bypassing of the truth, because there would not be another year to measure against this first one." Lewis, a striving actor turned drama teacher who longs to live in a treehouse, loses his human body and job and becomes increasingly belligerent. Wren, who spent her childhood and young adulthood as her mother's caretaker, cobbles together a saltwater pool and teaches herself scuba diving. Lewis's continually progressing condition will push their marriage to the breaking point, and leave them both struggling to find safe harbor in the face of an unimaginable future.
Habeck's world contentedly defies science and logic. Humans mutate into animals. A side character is pregnant with falcons. This slightly askew setting makes the characters' physical challenges feel more distant, allowing readers the space to fully engage with elements of loss and mortality. Told in a mixture of formats, including prose, poetry, and theatrical scripts, Shark Heart is a profound, lovely, hopeful interrogation of love and humanity. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads