Archives de catégorie : Fiction

THE BOOKBINDER OF JERICHO de Pip Williams

The second novel from the international bestselling author of The Dictionary Of Lost Words.

THE BOOKBINDER OF JERICHO
by Pip Williams
‎ Affirm Press Australia, November 2022
(via via Kaplan/Defiore Rights)

Whose truth is lost when knowledge is controlled by men? In 1914, when the war draws the young men of Britain away to fight, it is the women left behind who must keep the nation running. Two of those women are Peggy and Maude, twin sisters who work in the bindery at Oxford University Press. Peggy is intelligent, ambitious and dreams of going to Oxford University, but for most of her life she has been told her job is to bind the books, not read them. Maude, meanwhile, wants nothing more than what she has. She is extraordinary but vulnerable. Peggy needs to watch over her.
When refugees arrive from the devastated cities of Belgium, they send ripples through the community and through the sisters’ lives. Peggy begins to see the possibility of another future where she can use her intellect and not just her hands, but as war and illness reshape her world, it is love, and the responsibility that comes with it, that threaten to hold her back.
THE BOOKBINDER OF JERICHO is a story about knowledge – who makes it, who can access it, and what truth may be lost in the process. In this beautiful companion to the international bestseller
The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams explores another rarely seen slice of history seen through women’s eyes. Intelligent, thoughtful and rich with unforgettable characters.

Pip Williams was born in London and grew up in Sydney. She has spent most of her working life as a social researcher and is the author of The Dictionary of Lost Words and two nonfiction books. This is her first novel. Pip lives in the Adelaide Hills, Australia with her partner, two boys and an assortment of animals.

MALICE HOUSE de Megan Shepherd

New York Times bestselling author Megan Shepherd (The Madman’s Daughter) weaves a complex tale of dark magic and family secrets when a woman attempts to settle the estate of her father, an acclaimed horror novelist. Perfect fans of Lovecraft Country, Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, and The Babadook.

MALICE HOUSE
by Megan Shepherd
Hyperion Avenue, October 2022
(via Kaplan/Defiore Rights)

Of all the things aspiring artist Haven Marbury expected to find while clearing out her late father’s remote seaside house, Bedtime Stories for Monsters was not it. This secret handwritten manuscript is disturbingly different from his Pulitzer-winning works: its interweaving short stories crawl with horrific monsters and enigmatic humans that exist somewhere between this world and the next. The stories unsettle but also entice Haven, practically compelling her to illustrate them while she stays in the house that her father warned her was haunted―clearly just dementia whispering in his ear.
Reeling from a failed marriage, Haven hopes an illustrated
Bedtime Stories can be the lucrative posthumous father-daughter collaboration she desperately needs to jump-start her art career. However, everyone in the nearby vacation town wants a piece of the manuscript: her father’s obsessive literary salon members, the Ink Drinkers; her mysterious yet charming neighbor, who has a tendency toward 3:00 a.m. bonfires; a young barista with a literary forgery business; and of course, whoever keeps trying to break into her house. But when a monstrous creature appears under Haven’s bed right as grisly deaths are reported in the nearby woods, it’s clear she is about to uncover dark, otherworldly family secrets―and completely rewrite everything she ever knew about herself.

Megan Shepherd is a New York Times best-selling and Carnegie Medal-nominated author who grew up in her family’s independent bookstore in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She is the author of many acclaimed novels and now lives and writes on a historic farm outside Asheville, North Carolina, with her family, an especially scruffy dog, and several ghosts.

AN EXCITING AND VIVID INNER LIFE de Paul Dalla Rosa

Oscillating between elation and despair, AN EXCITING AND VIVID INNER LIFE is the debut short story collection from Sunday Times Short Story Award finalist Paul Dalla Rosa.

AN EXCITING AND VIVID INNER LIFE
by Paul Dalla Rosa
Allen & Unwin, May 2022
(via Neon Literary)

Whether working in food service or in high-end retail, lit by a laptop in a sex chat or by the camera of an acclaimed film director, sharing a dangerous apartment in the city, a rooming house in China or a vacation rental in Mallorca, the protagonists of the ten stories comprising Paul Dalla Rosa’s debut collection, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, navigate the spaces between aspiration and delusion, ambition and aimlessness, the curated profile and the unreliable body.
By turns unsparing and tender, Dalla Rosa explores our lives in late-stage Capitalism, where globalisation and its false promises of connectivity and equity leave us all further alienated and disenfranchised. His stories are small masterpieces of regret, futility and tenderness, dripping with acuity, irony and wit.
Like his acclaimed contemporary Ottessa Moshfegh and the legendary Lucia Berlin, Dalla Rosa is a masterful observer and unflinching eviscerator of our ugly, beautiful attempts at finding meaning in an ugly, beautiful world.

« The contemporary urgency of his stories is intoxicating…. This is such an exciting collection – writing this good is thrilling, exhilarating. » – Christos Tsiolkas, author of The Slap

Paul Dalla Rosa is a writer based in Melbourne, Australia. His stories have appeared in Granta, McSweeney’s, Meanjin and New York Tyrant. In 2019, his story ‘Comme’ was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award. He is currently undertaking his PhD at RMIT University, studying the real within contemporary fiction. An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life is his debut collection.

THE WITCH AND THE VAMPIRE de Francesca Flores

A queer Rapunzel retelling where a witch and a vampire who trust no one but themselves must journey together through a cursed forest with danger at every turn.

THE WITCH AND THE VAMPIRE
by Francesca Flores
Wednesday Books, March 2023
(via Park & Fine Literary)

Ava and Kaye used to be best friends. Until one night two years ago, vampires broke through the magical barrier protecting their town, and in the ensuing attack, Kaye’s mother was killed, and Ava was turned into a vampire. Since then, Ava has been trapped in her house. Her mother Eugenia needs her: Ava still has her witch powers, and Eugenia must take them in order to hide that she’s a vampire as well. Desperate to escape her confinement and stop her mother’s plans to destroy the town, Ava must break out, flee to the forest, and seek help from the vampires who live there. When there is another attack, she sees her opportunity and escapes.
Kaye, now at the end of her training as a Flame witch, is ready to fulfill her duty of killing any vampires that threaten the town, including Ava. On the night that Ava escapes, Kaye follows her and convinces her to travel together into the forest, while secretly planning to turn her in. Ava agrees, hoping to rekindle their old friendship, and the romantic feelings she’d started to have for Kaye before that terrible night.
But with monstrous trees that devour humans whole, vampires who attack from above, and Ava’s stepfather tracking her, the woods are full of danger. As they travel deeper into the forest, Kaye questions everything she thought she knew. The two are each other’s greatest threat―and also their only hope, if they want to make it through the forest unscathed.

Francesca Flores is a writer, traveler and linguist. Raised in Pittsburgh, she read every fantasy book she could get her hands on and started writing her own stories at a young age. She began writing the City of Diamond and Steel duology while working as a corporate travel manager. Francesca currently resides in San Francisco.

SECRETS SO DEEP de Ginny Myers Sain

From the bestselling author of Dark and Shallow Lies comes a moody and atmospheric paranormal thriller about a seventeen-year-old girl returning to an exclusive theater camp to uncover the truth of what really happened there twelve years ago, the night her mother drowned.

SECRETS SO DEEP
by Ginny Myers Sain
‎ Razorbill/Penguin BYR, September 2022
(via Park & Fine Literary)

Twelve years ago, Avril’s mother drowned at Whisper Cove theater, just off the rocky Connecticut coastline. It was ruled an accident, but Avril’s never been totally convinced. Local legend claims that the women in the waves—ghosts from old whaling stories—called her mother into the ocean with their whispering. Because, as they say at Whisper Cove, what the sea wants, the sea will have.
While Avril doesn’t believe in ghosts, she knows there are lots of different ways for places, and people, to be haunted. She’s spent the past twelve years trying to make sense of the strange bits and pieces she does remember from the night she lost her mother. Stars falling into the sea. A blinding light. A tight grip on her wrist. The odd sensation of flying. Now, at seventeen, she’s returning to Whisper Cove for the first time, and she might finally unravel the mystery of what really happened.
As Avril becomes more involved with camp director Willa and her mysterious son Cole, Whisper Cove reveals itself to her. Distances seem to shift in the strange fog. Echoes of long-past moments bounce off the marsh. And Avril keeps meeting herself—and her dead mother—late at night, at the edge of the ocean.
The truth Avril seeks is ready to be discovered. But it will come at a terrible cost.

Ginny Myers Sain lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and has spent the past twenty years working closely with teens as a director and acting instructor in a program designed for high school students seriously intent on pursuing a career in the professional theatre. Having grown up in deeply rural America, she is interested in telling stories about resilient kids who come of age in remote settings. Her debut novel Dark and Shallow Lies was published by Razorbill in 2021.