The Tiger Flu [Paperback]

WINNER, Lambda Literary Award

In this visionary novel by Larissa Lai—her first in sixteen years—a community of parthenogenic women, sent into exile by the male-dominated Salt Water City, goes to war against disease, technology, and powerful men that threaten them with extinction.

Kirilow is a doctor apprentice whose lover Peristrophe is a starfish, a woman who can regenerate her own limbs and organs, which she uses to help her clone sisters whose organs are failing. When a denizen from Salt Water City suffering from a mysterious flu comes into their midst, Peristrophe becomes infected and dies, prompting Kirilow to travel to Salt Water City, where the flu is now a pandemic, to find a new starfish who will help save her sisters. There, Kirilow meets Kora, a girl-woman desperate to save her family from the epidemic. Kora has everything Kirilow is looking for, except the will to abandon her own family. But before Kirilow can convince her, both are kidnapped by a group of powerful men to serve as test subjects for a new technology that can cure the mind of the body.

Bold, beautiful, and wildly imaginative,The Tiger Fluis at once a female heros saga, a cyberpunk thriller, and a convention-breaking cautionary tale—a striking metaphor for our complicated times. The Tiger Fluisn't just the story we want. It's the kind of story that we need, that we deserve, that we have been waiting for in this time of utopian dreaming and dystopian reality. It's a gift, and a reminder: We can be more than what we've been offered. We must choose more. We must choose each other, and life. —Autostraddle

A compelling cyberpunk thriller ... Lai draws inspiration from the feminist science fiction of Marge Piercy and Joanna Russ, exploring questions of reproduction, lesbian separatism, and biopolitics in the often absurdist and even surrealist world of Salt Water City. —Booklist

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