Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl

by Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Yuka Igarashi (Editor)

Mollusks’ innermost selves are absolute secrets because, not only do they hide in shells or distant habitats, but also that’s just how it is with innermost selves.

Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl collects Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s reminiscences, dreams, investigations, and experiments in being with small invertebrates whose vulnerability and creativity inspire radical reimaginings of Earthlinghood. In graceful linked essays, Wong What constitutes a self if a starfish can twist off one of his arms to explore the seafloor on its own? What is an animate being, considering a living snail is also an inanimate shell? What does love mean to a jellyfish, or time to an octopus? Her encounters with nonhuman animals reshape her language into different forms from collage to fragments, and prompt uncommon engagements with various texts. She looks behind words like “invasive” and “endling” in scientific articles and in poetry, questions natural selection with a bubble-rafting snail, sees the bivalve in Dostoevsky, and studies a speculative treatise about a “vampire squid from hell.”

Personal yet de-personal, at once tender and challenging, Wong’s essays invite humans to rethink our relationship to other beings. Instead of capturing and destroying them, using them as resources or reflections of ourselves, she asks us only to coexist with them—to cherish them although, and because, we cannot fully know them.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

168 pages, Paperback

Expected publication February 17, 2026

About the author

Mandy-Suzanne Wong is a Bermudian writer of fiction and essays. She is the author of The Box, a novel (Graywolf, House of Anansi); Drafts of a Suicide Note (Regal House), a Foreword INDIES literary-fiction finalist and PEN Open Book Award nominee; Listen, We All Bleed (New Rivers), a PEN/Galbraith-nominated essay collection and EcoLit Best Book of 2021; and Awabi, a duet of short stories, winner of the Digging Press Chapbook Series Award. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arcturus, Black Warrior Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, Litro, and Necessary Fiction, winning recognition in the Best of the Net, Aeon Award, and Eyelands Flash Fiction competitions.

Reviews

[Audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful ode to the mollusks and other sea creatures and just letting them be and to be in unobtrusive in observations. This was just lovely and made me think about snails in a whole different way.

I received an arc from the publisher but all opinions are my own.

[Tara]

Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl is a luminous, intellectually daring work that gently but firmly asks readers to rethink what it means to be alive, to be human, and to coexist with other beings on Earth. Mandy-Suzanne Wong writes with extraordinary attentiveness, listening to mollusks, starfish, jellyfish, and octopuses not as metaphors, but as presences that resist being fully known. The result is a book that feels both intimate and radically decentered from the human self.

What makes these essays remarkable is their formal inventiveness and ethical depth. Moving fluidly between memoir, philosophy, ecology, literary criticism, and poetic fragment, Wong reshapes language itself to better approach nonhuman life without claiming mastery over it. The book challenges extractive ways of seeing, scientific, linguistic, and emotional, and replaces them with a posture of humility, curiosity, and care. Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl is not only beautifully written; it is quietly transformative, lingering long after the final page.

[Annie Tate Cockrum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Animal writing that reads more as poetic (sometimes philosophical) than scientific. This sort of writing is very much my thing. At times it reminded me a lot of Sound of a Wild Snail Eating and Raising Hare but with a bit more of a Thaila Field vibe to it. Mandy-Suzanne Wong writes beautifully about non human beings in relation to us (humans) but also in relation to their own environments and ecosystems. Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl is unique and beautiful and special and I'm so glad to have read an advanced copy. It comes out on February 17th, 2026.

"It is my opinion that, during every moment, even the most fleeting chance encounter, in which an Earthling has the privilege of sharing life with someone of another species, what ought to matter is being comfortable in each other's company...being sensitive to cues which might indicates those conditions...Regardless of what remains unclear between you."