The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

It’s 16-year-old Edie who finds their mother Marianne dangling in the living room from an old jump rope, puddle of urine on the floor, barely alive. Upstairs, 14-year-old Mae had fallen into one of her trances, often a result of feeling too closely attuned to her mother’s dark moods. After Marianne is unwillingly admitted to a mental hospital, Edie and Mae are forced to move from their childhood home in Louisiana to New York to live with their estranged father, Dennis, a former civil rights activist and literary figure on the other side of success.

The girls, grieving and homesick, are at first wary of their father’s affection, but soon Mae and Edie’s close relationship begins to fall apart—Edie remains fiercely loyal to Marianne, convinced that Dennis is responsible for her mother’s downfall, while Mae, suffocated by her striking resemblances to her mother, feels pulled toward their father. The girls move in increasingly opposing and destructive directions as they struggle to cope with outsized pain, and as the history of Dennis and Marianne’s romantic past clicks into focus, the family fractures further.

Moving through a selection of first-person accounts and written with a sinister sense of humor, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish powerfully captures the quiet torment of two sisters craving the attention of a parent they can’t, and shouldn’t, have to themselves. In this captivating debut, Katya Apekina disquietingly crooks the lines between fact and fantasy, between escape and freedom, and between love and obsession.* Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Finalist.
* The Crook’s Corner Book Prize, Longlist.
* VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, Finalist.
* William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for Fiction, Shortlist.
* 35 Over 35 Award.
* A Best Book of 2018 —Kirkus Reviews, BuzzFeed News, Entropy, LitReactor, LitHub, The Book Table

“The father character, a maniacally selfish writer, made me cringe, to put it lightly!”
—Ottessa Moshfegh in GQ

"The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish is brilliantly structured, with multiple characters narrating the events of the novel. It's an unusual technique that Apekina uses to stunning effect, creating a kind of narrative tension that propels the novel forward... The structure, characters and storyline are all refreshingly original, and the writing is nothing short of gorgeous. It's a stunningly accomplished book, and Apekina isn't afraid to grab her readers by the hand and take them to some very dark and very beautiful places."
—Michael Schaub, NPR

"A guaranteed future-cult-classic novel that has the best title of any publication in history."
—Molly Young, Vulture

"Katya Apekina’s The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish has a dark sense of humor, and an interest in the soul. A layered account of the truths of a torn family, two sisters depart from their broken mother and return to their literary father. The sisters fall apart from each other, one toward her mother and the other toward her father. This impressive debut behaves like a great Russian novel transposed onto an American family. Katya Apekina discusses writing an emotional autobiography in a fictional story."
—Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm on KCRW

"It had been a minute since I sat down to read a new novel and found myself completely bowled over by it, swamped in it, enchanted with it... I read the whole thing in one evening, staying up late by the light of my bedside lamp to savor the last pages... Told by an ensemble of narrators and letters, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish delicately unravels layers of family trauma and deeply entrenched injustice."
—Claire Fallon, HuffPost

“Apekina’s inventiveness with structure and sentence marks the book’s every page, and the result is a propulsive and electrifying look at how family—and art—can both break people and put them back together again. A dark and unforgettable first book.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"With The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, Apekina establishes herself as a formidable voice in fiction — a writer to keep on your radar."
—Arianna Rebolini, BuzzFeed

Katya Apekina has had stories published in The Iowa Review, Santa Monica Review, West Branch, Joyland, PANK and elsewhere, and has appeared on the Notable List of Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013. She translated poetry and prose for Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), which was short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. She co-wrote the screenplay for the feature film New Orleans, Mon Amour, which premiered at SXSW in 2008. Born in Moscow, she currently lives in Los Angeles.