Archives de catégorie : Fiction

IN EVERY BIRD: BEFORE THE GARDEN de Katy Sewall

Sold in a heated 9-person auction in the US, right before Frankfurt, a prequel to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic The Secret Garden, for fans of Broken Country and The Thornbirds.

IN EVERY BIRD: BEFORE THE GARDEN
by Katy Sewall
Random House, Spring 2027
(via The Friedrich Agency)

A sweeping emotional tale and love story. IN EVERY BIRD: BEFORE THE GARDEN begins at the moment The Secret Garden starts—just as a cholera epidemic is sweeping through India—except this time, we flash back into the life of Mary Lennox’s mother, and the boy who will help her realize how expansive life can be.

“I was captivated and charmed by Katy Sewall’s debut novel, which more than does justice to its classic inspiration. I came into this book knowing as much about The Secret Garden as I did the Olive Garden, but by the end, I wanted nothing more than to stay a little longer in her rich and insightful world.” — Jess Walter, bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins

Katy Sewall is a writer and radio professional based in Seattle. She spent more than two decades working with NPR and currently hosts a weekly podcast called The Bittersweet Life, now in its 11th year.

THE GREAT WORK de Sheldon Costa

A grieving man and his nephew hunt down a myth in this gothic Western adventure for fans of Karen Russell and Victor LaValle.

THE GREAT WORK
by Sheldon Costa
Quirk Books, November 2025
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

Alone in a frontier town in the brand-new state of Washington, Gentle Montgomery is grieving his best friend. Liam, a self-taught alchemist, was killed when he tried to capture a creature that shouldn’t exist: a giant salamander that drives men mad. When Gentle’s nephew Kitt arrives at his doorstep, the two set out together to track the monster down, so they can use its blood in an alchemical formula that will bring Liam back to life.

It’s a hard and haunted journey through the Northwestern frontier. The salamander produces surreal nightmares and waking dreams of a blighted, burning future. And Gentle and Kitt soon find themselves pursued by a bloodthirsty hunter, a sadistic judge, and a doomsday cult, all of whom have their own plans for the river monster. Armed with nothing but Liam’s alchemical notebooks, they must not only find the salamander but learn to understand it—and the terrifying visions it causes—before it’s too late.

Unsettling and profound, THE GREAT WORK is an arcane adventure through the wilderness of friendship and the rotten heart of the early American empire.

“The Great Work is a vision of America as both homeland and horror story. And it also is just a good ol’ page turner, the kind of dark tale that delivers on every promise it makes.” — Joseph Fink, co-creator of Welcome to Night Vale

“Costa’s rip-snorting debut is a wild ride through freaky old America: backwoods alchemists, a sadistic reverend judge, an animalistic cult, and a quest for a primeval monster of nightmares come together in a hell-for-leather frontier yarn packed with action, wonder, and heart.” — James Kennedy, author of Bride of the Tornado “A moody, atmospheric, and singular novel which navigates corners of American history through the complicated territory of horror, the monstrous, and the heroic.” — Kelly Link, best-selling author of The Book of Love

Sheldon Costa is a writer originally from Post Falls, Idaho. His fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Electric Literature, Michigan Quarterly Review, Conjunctions, The Georgia Review, and Crazyhorse, among others. He is a winner of the AWP Intro Journal Project, the 2018 Helen Earnhart Harley Creative Writing Fellowship Award, and the Cream City Review’s 2019 Summer Prize in Fiction, judged by Ramona Ausubel. He holds an MFA from the Ohio State University and lives in rural Missouri with his wife and three cats. This is his debut novel.

GRIEFDOGG de Michael Winkler

Michael Winkler’s first novel Grimmish became a cult hit. Griefdogg is another triumph. Funny, sad, always entrancing, it tells a crazy-sane story about identity, love, family and forgiveness.

GRIEFDOGG
by Michael Winkler
Text Publishing (Australia), April 2026

Meet Jeffrey Watson-Johnson: hydrologist, husband of Martine, father of Bern, model citizen of Mildura.

After inheriting a small fortune from an obscure aunt and a disconcerting encounter with his cousin Pam, Jeffrey decides it’s time to change everything.

He wants to live like the family pet.

As his relationships face upheaval, Jeffrey withdraws further from his old life. Sleeping through the day or wandering beside the river, he discovers a new power: he can sense secret grief in others. What to do with this gift? Or with his awareness of the endless streams of water flowing unseen beneath the earth?

Michael Winkler’s first novel Grimmish became a cult hit. Griefdogg is another triumph. Funny, sad, always entrancing, it tells a crazy-sane story about identity, love, family and forgiveness.

Michael Winkler is a writer from Melbourne, living on the unceded lands of the Kulin nation. He is the author, co-author and editor of numerous books. His novel Grimmish was shortlisted for the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award, and he won the Calibre Essay Prize for ‘The Great Red Whale’. His journalism, short fiction, reviews and essays have been widely published and anthologised.

THE LAST RUN de Rachel Weaver

A story of family, resilience, and hard work, about fiercely independent people doing the best they can and coming to the hard truth that sometimes, what takes the most courage, is accepting the help of others.

THE LAST RUN
by Rachel Weaver
Lake Union, June 2026
(via Harvey Klinger, Inc.)

It’s been years since Ellie has fished the Alaskan waters—not since her mother died, not since her father took to drink, and not since the birth of her five-year-old son. She’s been living half a life, working a cubicle job in a small fishing town and drowning in debt while barely having the energy to be a single mom to Drew. When she finds her father lying in an alleyway, she learns he’s done the unforgivable. Pete has gambled away the family legacy, the fishing boat and license, and unless he can come up with fifty thousand in two months, the bookie will get everything, Pete will be homeless and Ellie and her son will be stuck in the grinding cycle of poverty. Ellie agrees to fish the season with her dad, bringing Drew on the boat as they chase the pipe dream of making enough money to pay off the debt. Ellie is used to the 20-hour days and the back-breaking work, and she’s used to risking her life to find the biggest catch. What she’s not used to is accepting help from others, and definitely not from a secretive homesteader who seems to have demons of his own. Ellie’s growing attraction and the dangerous Alaskan waters are the least of her worries, though. Because Ellie is hiding secrets of her own and, as the date with the bookie draws closer, she is at risk of losing it all.

THE LAST RUN is a story of family, resilience, and hard work. It’s about fiercely independent people doing the best they can and coming to the hard truth that sometimes, what takes the most courage, is accepting the help of others. Featuring a woman fighting against the limits of her existence and whose story is shaped by her relationships with the natural world, it would appeal to the same audience as Della Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing, Shelley Read’s Go As A River, Julia Phillips’ Bear and novels by Charlotte McConaghy.

Rachel Weaver is the author of Point of Direction (Ig Publishing, 2014), which Oprah Magazine named a « Top Ten Book to Pick Up Now.” It was chosen by the American Booksellers Association as a Top Ten Debut for Spring 2014, by IndieBound as an Indie Next List Pick, by Yoga Journal as one of their Top Five Suggested Summer Reads and it won the 2015 Willa Cather Award for Fiction. Prior to earning her MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University, Rachel worked for the Forest Service in Alaska studying bears, raptors, and songbirds. She is on faculty at Regis University’s MFA program and Wilke’s University’s MFA program, and her work has appeared in The Sun, Gettysburg Review, Blue Mesa Review, Alaska Women Speak, and Fly Fishing New England.

THIS WILL BE THE END OF ME de Jared Young

A mind-bending locked-room mystery where every suspect is the same man—and so is the corpse. Knives Out meets Everything Everywhere All At Once: clever, twisty, and impossible to put down.

THIS WILL BE THE END OF ME
by Jared Young
Crown Fiction, spring 2027

Joshua Hoffman is throwing a weekend-long party at his remote lakeside home with nine alternate versions of himself—other selves who made different choices at various crossroads in Joshua Hoffman’s life and ended up in wildly different circumstances.

To distinguish themselves from one another, they adopt nicknames. Among them are: The Argentinian, who fled his dreary hometown for a life of luxury in South America; The Townie, who stayed behind to marry his high school crush; The Marksman, a single father struggling to raise his troubled daughter; The Director, a Hollywood filmmaker facing an embarrassing end to his career; and The Teacher, a man of faith and moral duty who unknowingly carries a dark secret.

Some of the Joshua Hoffmans have gained fame and fortune, others have embraced the stability of family life. But over the course of the weekend, all of them will uncover deep wells of existential doubt and unhappiness as they reckon with what might have been. And when one of the Joshua Hoffmans turns up dead – brutally strangled in an upstairs bedroom – the others must confront a horrifying truth: a killer is among them.

As the violence escalates and the bodies pile up – stabbed, drowned, and burned alive – paranoia tears the group apart. Which Joshua Hoffman wants to kill his other selves, and why? Desperate to survive until the end of the weekend, they interrogate, accuse, and attack each other. When every suspect looks just like the others, finding the murderer is next to impossible. 

Deftly told in rotating first-person perspectives, each chapter immerses readers in the consciousness of a different Joshua Hoffman—men divided by circumstance but bound by identity. THIS WILL BE THE END OF ME is for readers who love the ingenious puzzles of Agatha Christie and Stuart Turton, the unsettling tension of Iain Reid and Paul Tremblay, and the raw emotional introspection of writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard and Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s for fans of high-concept mysteries that double as philosophical meditations, for readers who want both page-turning suspense and a work of literary ambition that asks philosophical questions about how to live a life.

Jared Young’s body of work spans books, magazines, and feature films. He is the author of the novel Into the Current, which was longlisted for the ReLit Award in 2016. His stories and essays have appeared in publications around the world, and have been anthologized by McSweeney’s. He is the writer of the feature film, Sinister Switch, and currently has multiple scripts optioned and in development. 
As a creative director, his brand and campaign work has won international recognition, and has been covered by Adweek and The Globe & Mail. His book trailer for Into The Current was the first ever to screen at a major international film festival when it premiered at SXSW in 2017, where it won both the Audience and Jury Awards. Jared also publishes “Tolstoyan,” a Substack newsletter about culture, literature, and philosophy. His essay Youth, about the regrets of middle-age, recently went viral, generating thousands of new subscribers and becoming a Substack Editors’ Pick. He lives in Chelsea, Quebec, with his wife and two children.