Bookmarked: Shark Heart by Emily Habeck

This post marks the inception of a new series on my blog: “Bookmarked,” an ongoing collection of reviews dedicated to the books that linger or make me think about life far beyond the ending. These are the stories that take root, not necessarily because they are the most technically dazzling or universally adored, but because they shift the atmosphere of thought. Books that follow me from room to room, reframing how I think, feel, and move through the quiet moments of ordinary life. In this series, I aim to reflect on those works in part review and part personal essay, interrogating what makes certain narratives so enduring.

Let’s begin with Emily Habeck's debut novel, Shark Heart, which defies easy classification. I picked it up on a whim last year and finished it feeling emotionally rearranged.

In December 2023, I was on a shopping trip with my dad and sister. I drifted into the fiction section, a familiar shelter for when social energy wanes and tactile comfort is needed. I’d noticed Shark Heart listed among Goodreads’ Best Fiction of 2023 but had filed it away mentally. Then I saw the cover: moody, painterly, and full of visual tension. It drew me in, and the plot seemed funky (we’ll get to that part). That kind of blind literary trust is rare for me, but in this case, it paid off.

The Surreal Setup and a non-spoiler-y synopsis

The novel begins with Wren and Lewis, a newly married couple navigating the emotional topography of early partnership. Their relationship is built on gentle affection and a mutual, if tentative, hope. And then, Lewis is diagnosed with a rare and irreversible condition. He is gradually transforming into a great white shark.

I know, I know. I also feel like I don’t need to ask you to stay with me here; the great white shark aspect is intriguing enough as is.

This isn’t a metaphor in the narrative sense. Within the world Habeck builds, animal transformation is a documented, albeit rare, medical condition. There are specialists, case studies, and institutional frameworks for care. Yet, the novel doesn’t rely on spectacle. The surreal premise is presented with emotional restraint, which makes the story all the more affecting. Rather than veering into allegory or absurdity, Shark Heart becomes a meditation on bodily change, intimacy's fragility, and impermanence ache.

Lewis’s transformation becomes a lens through which Habeck explores the disorienting experience of terminal illness. His slow departure from the human world mirrors the devastating trajectory of degenerative disease, in which physical and cognitive decline create distance between the individual and those who love them. Habeck’s prose doesn’t sensationalize. Instead, it lingers on the emotional texture of the experience, like how it feels to watch someone shift incrementally and how absence begins long before death.

The speculative conceit allows Habeck to articulate the ineffable: the ambivalence of caregiving, the guilt of self-preservation, and the quiet terror of watching a partner become unreachable. Like Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go or Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, the novel’s emotional force lies in its ability to render loss not as a single rupture but as a sustained erosion.

This novel is deeply concerned with time: its acceleration, limits, and how it reshapes relationships. The question is not simply how to say goodbye but how to remain present when goodbye becomes inevitable.

A Study in Anticipatory Grief

Like Wren, I’ve understood the contours of anticipatory grief through personal experience. I’ve written before about my grandmother and how her final year felt like a prolonged farewell, a quiet, devastating unfolding that required me to start mourning long before she was gone. That grief still lingers, soft around the edges (sometimes) but always present. Living away from my parents and aging grandfather, I feel that same sensation humming beneath the surface again: the pressure to make every visit count, memorize laughter, the wrinkles forming beneath my parent’s eyes, and not let time slip unnoticed. The peculiar grief of knowing loss is inevitable is not yet here.

Wren, the novel’s emotional core, is left to navigate the psychic dissonance of loving someone whose body no longer abides by familiar rules. As Lewis transforms, she is called to witness and adapt to the change. Habeck’s precise, lyrical prose conveys this process's emotional weight. Grief arrives not as a cataclysm but as a slow sedimentation. Each chapter feels like a layer, gently compacting sorrow beneath the surface.

Habeck captures the phenomenon of anticipatory grief. Wren’s mourning begins long before any final loss, and it is within that prolonged in-between space that the novel finds its most profound resonance. The rituals of daily life, meals, conversations, and even touch are marked by absence. Love remains, but its expression has to shift.

Why It Resonates

What makes Shark Heart remarkable is not the strangeness of its premise but the restraint and intimacy of its execution. Habeck writes with reverence for small gestures: a hand brushing against fabric, the silence between two people sitting in a room. These are the moments that reveal the most profound truths. There is no melodrama here, only an accumulation of grief, tenderness, and time.

The novel resonates with anyone who has experienced the slow decline of a loved one or who has been the steady hand beside someone slipping away. It is not a story about sharks. It is a story about love shaped by constraint and identity transformed by inevitability. Its intriguing plot pulls the reader into the characters’ complex world and keeps them there.

Shark Heart is an elegant, emotionally grounded debut stretching literary fiction's bounds. Its speculative frame enables a raw and necessary exploration of care, loss, and the shifting terrain of relationships altered by illness. This fiction does not seek to explain grief, but to inhabit it—to give it a shape and a language that feels both lyrical and lived.

This book will stay with me. I’ll return to its sentences, imagery, and emotional clarity. When I recommend it, I won’t say much, as I will. I’ll hand it to someone and say, “Read this, and please take your time.”