Finalist for the Lambda Award for Bisexual Fiction and the AWC Townsend Prize for the Best Book in Georgia.
Monster in the Middle is a novel and a short story collection. It explores intimacy through a generational, historical and societal lens. It provides a rare look into colonialism in America, as well as the experience of being Black in America and the Caribbean over the past 50 years. It takes us from the the Challenger explosion up to Covid-19.
Stories from the book have already won many accolades: including selected as one the Best American Short Stories of 2021 by Curtis Sittenfield; and published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Harvard Review and the Yale Review.
Reviews
“Yanique brilliantly unifies the novel through her scintillating, consistently lyrical language, whether using lampoon, introspection, or tense social drama.”
— Los Angeles Review of Books
“Monster in The Middle pulls you in from the very first scene.
— Shondaland
“The story of one couple is magnified and layered through the histories of the generations of lovers that preceded them. Spanning decades and geographies, this novel reveals on every page how love can persevere and take shape over time and space.”
— The Boston Globe
“Monster in the Middle is as boundless as it is affecting. Yanique’s prose leaps with possibility, as her characters live and laugh and fight and love. Yanique captures romance from its peaks to its craters, deftly weaving whole worlds from everything in between.
— Bryan Washington, author of Memorial
“Unique and memorable…Look to your roots, Yanique urges us, and maybe you’ll see the outline of your future. A rich and honest examination of family histories, cultural disconnection, and the way people fall in love.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“Back and forth, through time and space, we examine the human propensity to love, to fail at loving, to love again.” –New York Times Book Review “Tiphanie Yanique's Monster in the Middle is an ambitious novel… Through these stories, Yanique deftly explores the role identity, religion and culture as well as family play in who and how we're able to love. "
— NPR.org
“Themes of race, religion, class, and education appear throughout this ambitious novel, but its abiding focus is on the intimate, and the way broader social forces can impinge upon it… Reality assumes a surreal tinge, and the fluidity of narration, across time, space, and character, imparts an epic register to the intimate encounter between Stela and Fly. “
— Harpers Magazine
“In Yanique’s world, life is like the ocean — there are a lot of ups and downs. Love does not guarantee a happy ending, but sometimes it can save you from drowning.”
— The Atlanta Journal Constitution
“Tiphanie Yanique’s Monster in the Middle is a compelling exploration of how we become who we are and how we manage to find our way to love. In her lyrical prose, the myriad possibilities of being—the accidents of birth, of sex, of race and geography, the choices we make, our compulsions—coalesce into something that feels, gloriously, like destiny.”
— Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Memorial Drive
“A total wonder. Utterly original and structurally thrilling. I am in awe of this novel and Tiphanie Yanique’s masterful storytelling. This feels like a modern fable, a contemporary folk ballad full of unforgettable characters who, by the end, felt as familiar to me as family. What a gorgeous ode to love and its power.”
— Brandon Taylor, author of Filthy Animals and Real Life
“Yanique is a writer’s writer, one of the most inventive and talented stylists of her generation… [She] explores the way love can echo along the corridors of history, through police brutality and a pandemic, deftly weaving and juxtaposing the trajectories that make love possible.”
— Vulture
“A genre-defying multigenerational love story that move fluidly across time and geography, Yanique’s sophomore novel deftly engrosses readers in the mysterious ways of love and relationships. Told via multiple POVs and set against the backdrop of such historic tragedies as the Challenger explosions and the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, Yanique narratively excavates how our family origins influence our aptitude for intimacy.”
— Oprah Daily
“Monster in the Middle manages something extraordinary—it’s a truly unique story about love, specifically Black love. In Yanique’s telling, it’s not “boy meets girl,” but “two people meet, and thousands of years of family trees, values, and experiences converge.” It’s transporting and deeply emotional.”
— Glamour
“Yanique (How to Escape from a Leper Colony) inventively juxtaposes the start of a new relationship with family histories in this sumptuous saga. Each arc reads as an evocative short story and an episode in the two protagonists’ complex set of unraveled connections. This introspective exploration of first and lasting loves will hit the spot with fans of character-driven family dramas.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Tiphanie Yanique is one of our very best writers. This book is another marvel, expertly mixing voices and styles, even structures and traditions, to capture the way lives naturally flow together and apart over time. The relationship between Fly and Stella is also a relationship between land and sea, between trauma and joy, between mainland and island, between nations, between families. Monster in the Middle is a book to study and savor.”
—Matthew Salesses, author of Craft in the Real World
“The family histories Yanique weaves in explain the couple’s motivation, whether they are running from their experiences or finally facing their traumas head on. The writing is soft and intricate with no detail wasted. Readers are lured into the themes of self-discovery, acceptance, and trauma, with an ending well worth the investment.”
— Booklist
Excerpt from Monster in the Middle
“Yes, this is an American love story. Because on the first day of school orientation there was a speech for Morehouse men and Spelman women. The two schools tight together. The speaker said that thing I gather now the college presidents in America always say, white or Black: “The person sitting next to you might be your future husband or wife.” And me, I was at the end of the row. I was older than most and I’d been unsure about coming to the big meeting to begin with. By then I was even a little ashamed at having been a soldier at all. Death will do that to a man. So, I’d snuck in late. On one side there was no one next to me. I stared at the empty space for a while to think about that. It had been so lonely ironing all those years. No buddies to grieve over because they were dead. Dead when they came to me.
But thank God for that New Year’s Day. And for all the new years and new days. I am thankful for all of it. Every bit. Because there in the great hall with that man talking about looking to our right and left . . . who was that man? I wish I could thank him. He spoke so well and so clear. . . . I turned from the emptiness at my right. And there to my left? Your mother. Looking at me like she’d been on a long journey just to get to that selfsame spot. And when she said, “Good morning,” I heard her accent. Imagine. A Virgin Islander. At her feet—a baby basket. What year was it by then? Nineteen ninety-three, must have been. Because in the basket? You. Sleeping, though I would come to know that sleeping wasn’t so much a baby’s style. Me? I didn’t know yet how your mother could curse me like cursing could kill. How she could love like loving alone would make me live. How she could take a motherless man—me—and make a father and a husband. All I knew was that I hadn’t heard those Saint Thomas sounds in so long. Sounded like my own mother.