Told in alternating chapters that braid the past with the near-present, Methuselah follows Tessa as she shuns college and sets out on the road with her doom metal band, a ragtag group called Pestilential Harbor.
But when she discovers that one of the members has been keeping an explosive secret, the band splinters. Tessa settles in San Diego, drifting through her twenties as love—and meaningful connections with other people—always seems just out of reach.
As droughts and wildfires sweep her home state, she obsessively keeps tabs on the safety of a 4,000-year-old bristlecone pine tree named Methuselah (this means repeatedly pressing return on a Google search of "Is Methuselah still alive?”). But as her grandmother slides into dementia, and the natural world feels more distant than ever, it will take more than refreshing a webpage to keep Tessa's hope in the future alive.
Time folds in on itself, each chapter offering a new vantage point: from a hallucinogenic New Year’s Eve party to a dust-white Bronx apartment to a ghost town in the Mojave Desert.
Methuselah is a meditation on time, memory, family history, and what it means to live in an increasingly fast-paced and disconnected world.
Perfect for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney, Methuselah offers a raw and haunting glimpse into our collective lonelinesses, anxieties, and desires.
Coming February 3 2026
Praise
"Amy DeBellis writes with ferocious conviction for truth. This is what allows her fiction to unabashedly dissect the lives of her characters, peeling back skin and sinew to expose the raw underbelly of desire, insecurity, and rebellion. Methuselah is a masterful display of DeBellis’ dedication to craft, which has enabled her to expertly construct a rich world of her own making—one that feels as authentic and troubled as the one we live in today.”
— Nicholas Claro, author of This Is Where You Are: Stories
“Methuselah is a kaleidoscopic story of longing, anxiety, and mortality—one only a singularly gifted writer like Amy DeBellis could tell. It slowly creeps beneath your skin and finds its way to your marrow. Every page will remind you why you fell in love with reading.”
— Samantha Crewson, author of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter
“Methuselah navigates the fragile ecosystem of human relationships in a push and pull between realism and idealism, art and practicality, reason and transcendence. The setting of this gem of a novella is deftly wrought and alluringly atmospheric. With the smoke of climate disasters billowing on the horizon, the distressed and angsty hotel rooms, unkempt apartments, and punk bars, this story is about the power that time holds over our transient lives. Tessa is haunted by the irrevocable loss of her past. Moving forward is its own kind of loss, as the future never seems to bring the taking-off point she has been waiting for. But even as she wades through disappointment after disappointment, Tessa comes into the breathtaking awareness that she shares the planet with Methuselah, a tree nearly five thousand years old. The tree’s roots spread through the story with signature stubbornness. Life is a dauntless, secret, and gnarled thing, the tree seems to say. And the spiny resilience of Methuselah deserves to be honored and protected. In the face of the tree's seeming immortality, however, DeBellis holds out the possibility that perhaps the past ought to pass away, as fleeting as a thought. The frantic pursuit of bionic memory and immortality, DeBellis shows us, will not elevate humanity. Only art, electric and ephemeral—only nature, imperiled and persistent—only life, grievously and marvelously short—can do that.”
— M. C. Benner Dixon, author of The Height of Land