In Tara Menon’s debut novel, Under Water, the primary narrator, Marissa, talks about reading Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam, an elegy to his dead friend Arthur Henry Hallam. “I felt like someone finally understood,” she says, pointing out that while our language is overwhelmed by the love and loss of lovers, “there is no place in our language for grief about friends, or love for them.”Under Water attempts to fill this gap: its emotional core is a heartwarming portrait of a friendship between two girls — a relationship that is tragically cut short. Written in a first-person braided narrative that alternates between Thailand in 2004, around the time of the Indian Ocean tsunami, and New York in 2012, in the period leading up to Hurricane Sandy, the book opens with an eerie, phantasmagorical scene.In this dream sequence, Marissa is eating fish in an upscale restaurant with three other men when all the diners begin choking on their food and spitting out human remains resembling her now-dead friend, Arielle. From there, the novel moves to New York, where Marissa lives, working as an editorial assistant at a luxury travel magazine, a job that mostly consists of her writing purple prose about places she never actually visits.