Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2025: the profound and life-affirming memoir about finding our way in a chaotic world

‘A sumptuous, surprising, dark delight’ Carmen Maria Machado

‘Fast-moving, deftly balanced, full of surprises’ Guardian‘s Book of the Day

‘A bold and original blend of memoir and science’ Elizabeth Buchanan

If fish don’t exist, what else do we have wrong?

As a child, Lulu Miller’s scientist father taught her that chaos will come for us all. There is no cosmic destiny, no plan. Enter David Starr Jordan, 19th-century taxonomist and believer in order. A fish specialist devoted to mapping out the great tree of life, who spent his days pinning down unruly fins, studying shimmering scales and sealing new discoveries into jars of ethanol.

At a time when Lulu’s life is unravelling, David Starr Jordan beckons. Reading about Jordan’s sheer perseverance after an earthquake shattered his collection, Lulu stumbles upon an unexpected antidote to life’s unpredictability. But lurking behind the lore of this mighty taxonomist lies a darker tale waiting to be told: one about the human cost of attempting to define the form of things unknown.

This is a story unlike any other you’ve read before. It’s about a very tall man with a walrus moustache, the injustices and unexpected deliverances of the universe, love that strikes like lightning and about why fish don’t exist after all.

Reviews

This genre-defying journey into the science of classification weaves memoir and history in shimmering prose

Guardian

I want to live at this book’s address: the intersection of history and biology and wonder and failure and sheer human stubbornness. What a sumptuous, surprising, dark delight

Here is a book that hops nimbly between biography and autobiography, gritty science and lovelorn self-help. And its final, happy leap into the unknown is just astonishing

Prospect Magazine

Her book took me to strange depths I never imagined, and I was smitten

New York Times Book Review

A story told with an open heart, every page of it animated by verve, nuance, and full-throated curiosity

This book will capture your heart, seize your imagination, smash your preconceptions, and rock your world

I didn’t want to read another biography of a dead, white man – fortunately, that’s not what this is. Instead, Miller asks an age-old question: how do you go on? She finds an answer both original and prescient

TLS

Strangely compelling

The Times

Moves gracefully between reporting and meditation, big questions and small moments. A magical hybrid of science, portraiture, and memoir-and a delight to read

This book is perfect, just perfect. It’s both lyrical and learned, personal and political, small and huge, quirky and profound

A tale so seductive that I read her book in one sitting

The Wall Street Journal

Stunning and brilliant and completely un-sum-up-able… I love this book so much!

Wholly unique and a true delight

Refinery29

A wild ride… that upends our idea of what fish (and we) are in the grand scheme of things

Slate

A touching blend of biography, science, philosophy and self-reflection. Like its provocative title, it’s full of surprises

Remarkable… Lulu Miller draws a heartening lesson-that chaos, which comes for us all, can be defeated by sheer human stubbornness

Los Angeles Times

Engrossing… thought-provoking… Lulu Miller does the job with style and intelligence

Ingenious… A quirky wonder of a book

Kirkus Reviews

Quirky, fascinating

Daily Mail

The excitement and curiosity in which she sees and investigates the world is contagious

Economist Podcast

Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist takes someone even less redeemable-the early 20th-century scientist and eugenicist David Starr Jordan-and carries us into the outer reaches of knowledge itself

Prospect Magazine Best Books 2024