Between memory and the future, love and loss, a young man searches for meaning in a world on the brink.

Peter Fischer, a twenty-something from the Skylands of New Jersey, navigates the turbulent months between Occupy Wall Street and Hurricane Sandy. On his first assignment as a healthcare attendant in Manhattan, he cares for Benjamin X, a man whose memory falters after an “accident” yet whose vision of the future is startlingly clear.

Peter also meets Mamiko, Benjamin’s adopted daughter, and is swept into a romance that is as unexpected as it is transformative. But as his professional and personal lives collide, Peter must confront the lingering shadow of his father’s death—a man whose career at a government weapons-testing facility left behind questions, regrets, and unresolved grief. In the Riddle Sea is a sharp, evocative exploration of love, memory, and the fragile human connections we cling to amid societal and environmental upheaval.

Praise for In the Riddle Sea

"With echoes of Jenny Offill’s Weather, In the Riddle Sea is a deeply human New York love story told within layers of grief that captures the existential vertigo of our times."

—Donna M Cameron, author of The Rewilding

“In the Riddle Sea is a quiet explosion of a novel, and Brennen Wysong takes us through a potted history of Lower Manhattan as a site of cyclical destruction—the Wall Street bombing on Sept. 16, 1920, 9/11, Hurricane Sandy, plus the invisible daily financial war waged to widen the gap between rich and poor. This is a striking and yet tender novel of fragments that draws on the tradition of the French New Wave as a shockwave of Little Boy and the Fat Man, the toxic dust in the lungs of those calling out corruption and singing dirges to the collapse of capitalism at Occupy Wall Street protests.”

—Adam Ouston author of Waypoints and Mine 

“With spare, unforced prose, Brennen Wysong captures the truth of moments as they pass. Caregiving routines, late-night radio songs, baseball games, and political unrest form a textured montage of a life being lived. The result is a novel that feels intimate, precise, and quietly devastating.”

—Brendan Colley, author of The Signal Line and The Season for Flying Saucers  

“In the Riddle Sea takes hold and haunts with a love story in NYC’s recent past—a hypnotic and human song with the pull of mystery, disaster, and history. Brennen Wysong knows how to make you root for his characters and for the shifting world they keep finding and losing themselves in.

—Matt Sweeney, guitar and vocals, The Hard Quartet, and host of Guitar Moves

“In the Riddle Sea jumps off the page. Just like on the records spinning through the story—riffs appear, reappear, a countermelody intervenes. A rest—next verse—an echo of something familiar (Woolf or Faulkner?) bubbles up. Something new, of the moment, bridges in. Always, the music builds, the narrative drives forward, like a drummer racing you to the end of the song.”

—Tim Harris, bass, Antietam