A woman's sexual awakening is a tragedy when the woman is married to someone other than the man who awakens her. But until then, her marriage, now doomed, was a sleepwalker's tragedy. This novel will shock and offend some readers. Unapologetically explicit in its language, extreme in some of the acts it catalogues, it makes no pretense of submission to middle-class decency, let alone to expectations of happy endings. All three people in this love triangle are flawed, damaged, human. Things fall apart, and the resolution is unclear. Why does she do it? Why should we read it? The answer is one word: Ecstasy. Micheline Aharonian Marcom has a genius for language that is not only beautiful in and of itself, but also engages the heart. Lusher than Marguerite Duras, more tender and erotic than Cormac McCarthy, but nearly as dark, this is a narrative masterpiece....

The extraordinary new novel from the winner of the: 2004 Lannan Literary Fellowship 2005 PEN USA Literary Award for Fiction 2006 Whiting Writers’ Award

“A new work of obsession, tragedy, and the unpredictable trajectories of the heart.”(Cristina Garcia, author of Dreaming in Cuban)

A powerful testament about the far-reaching effects of political brutality and lost love, Draining the Sea sifts through the incongruities of history and memory, unfurling inside the mind of a man who spends his days driving the streets of Los Angeles, racked by visions of the Guatemalan Civil War and, in particular, of Marta, a beautiful young prostitute who died violently in it—a tragedy in which he himself may have played a role....