The Man with the Compound Eyes

About

A massive island made entirely of ocean garbage crashes into the coast of Taiwan, bringing together two unlikely survivors: Atile'i, a boy cast out from a mythical Pacific island, and Alice, a Taiwanese professor on the verge of suicide. The collision of trash island and coastline becomes a meeting point for ecological disaster, indigenous mythology, and the question of what humans owe the oceans they've been filling with waste. Wu Ming-Yi writes ecological fiction that is simultaneously urgent and lyrical, treating the garbage island not as metaphor but as literal consequence — the physical residue of consumption that the world's currents have assembled into something monstrous and undeniable. A novel about what the ocean sends back — and the two people who have to decide whether to keep living in the world that made it.