An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth is a formidable, uncanny, and utterly unique new novel from accomplished novelist and poet, Anna Moschovakis

In An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, an unnamed narrator struggles to regain the ability to walk after a sudden seismic event has rendered unpredictable shifts and undulations in the ground. Convinced of a need to find and kill her younger housemate, Tala, who has disappeared, the narrator struggles physically and psychically to contend with her homicidal task in the wake of failure as a Method actor. The narrator travels back in time and out into a dust-covered, shadowy city, where she is targeted by charismatic “healing” ideologues with uncertain motives. Torn between a paranoid suspicion of internalized, toxic language, and a desperate attempt to find stability and feel something like whole, she is forced to question familiar figurations of light, shadow, authenticity, and voice, taking tentative steps toward a new understanding of self and world.

Darkly comic, entirely relatable, and hallucinatory in tone, An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth will appeal to readers of Annie Ernaux, Lynne Tillman, Dionne Brand, Natalia Ginzburg, Renee Gladman, Anna Kavan, Sheila Heti, and Fernanda Melchor, among others.

A brilliant and prescient story of an intellectual woman’s engagement with two book clubs amid climate catastrophe and political strife… Moschovakis brings her fierce intelligence to bear in the structurally surprising and impeccably executed narrative. This is formal innovation at its finest. —Publishers Weekly, starred review for Participation