Archives de catégorie : Fiction

SANDYMANCER de David Edison

A wild girl with sand magic in her bones and a mad god who is trying to fix the world he broke come together in SANDYMANCER, a genre-warping mashup of weird fantasy and hard science fiction.

SANDYMANCER
Sandymancer Series, Book 1
by David Edison
Tor Books, September 2023
(via Vertical Ink)

All Caralee Vinnet has ever known is dust. Her whole world is made up of the stuff; water is the most precious thing in the cosmos. A privileged few control what elements remain. But the world was not always a dust bowl and the green is not all lost.

Caralee has a secret—she can draw up power from the sand beneath her feet. But when she does… she winds up summoning a monster: The former god-king who broke the world 800 years ago and has stolen the body of her best friend.

Caralee will risk the whole world to take back what she’s lost. If her new companion doesn’t kill her first.

SANDYMANCER is what happens when Oz meets Armageddon, with failed gods, lost magics, and murderous gigantic steel harpies. Caralee has always longed to see more of this broken world – but as she stumbles upon its secret roots, she may discover that their doomsday wasn’t quite what everyone thought.

David Edison was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and has spent most of his life living in New York City and California. His passions include rescuing pit bulls, leveling up, and all things queer.

INVISIBLE WOMAN de Katia Lief

From internationally bestselling crime writer Katia Lief, INVISIBLE WOMAN is the story of a dangerous secret held for too long between estranged best friends and a long marriage that comes apart with devastating consequences.

INVISIBLE WOMAN
by Katia Lief
‎ Atlantic Monthly Press/Grove Atlantic, January 2024

Joni Ackerman’s decision to raise children came with a steep cost. Twenty-five years ago, she was a pioneering filmmaker, one of the few women to break into the all-male club of Hollywood feature film directors. But she and her husband Paul had always wanted a family, and his ascending career at a premier television network provided a safety net. They have recently transplanted to Brooklyn, so that Paul can launch a major East Coast production studio, when a scandal rocks the film industry and forces Joni to revisit a secret from long ago involving a powerful man who abused women, including the friend of her youth, Val.

Joni is adamant that the time has come to tell the story, but Val and Paul are reluctant, for different reasons. As the marriage frays and the friends spar about whether to speak up, Joni’s struggles with isolation in a new city and old resentments about the sacrifices she made start to boil over. She takes solace in the novels of Patricia Highsmith—particularly the masterpiece Strangers on a Train, with its duplicitous characters and their murderous impulses—until the lines between reality and fantasy become blurred.

INVISIBLE WOMAN is at once a literary thriller about the lies we tell each other (and ourselves), and a powerful psychological examination of friendship, marriage, and motherhood.

Katia Lief is the author, most recently, of the novels A Map of the Dark and Last Night published by Mulholland Books/Little, Brown under the pseudonym Karen Ellis. Earlier work includes USA Today and internationally bestselling novels Five Days in Summer (a #1 bestseller in Germany), One Cold Night (#1 on Kobo’s UK bestseller list), and The Money Kill, the fourth installment of her Karin Schaeffer series published by HarperCollins and nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award. She teaches fiction writing at The New School in Manhattan and lives with her family in Brooklyn.

 

HOT SPRINGS DRIVE de Lindsay Hunter

An urgent, vicious blade of a novel about a shocking betrayal and its aftermath, HOT SPRINGS DRIVE asks just how far you’ll go to have everything you want.

HOT SPRINGS DRIVE
by Lindsay Hunter
‎ Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic, November 2023

Jackie Stinson’s best friend is dead, and everyone knows who killed her.

Jackie wants to be many things, but a martyr has never been one of them. She is an ex-emotional eater and mother of four, who has finally lost the weight she long yearned to be free of. In her new, sharp-edged body, she goes by Jacqueline. But leaving her old self behind proves harder than she ever imagined. And while she believes she should be happier, misery still chases her, and motherhood threatens to subsume what little is left of her.

Her only salve is her best friend Theresa, whose seemingly perfect life she desperately covets. Since they met in the maternity ward 15 years earlier, the two have survived the trials of motherhood side by side—Theresa with her quiet, cherubic daughter, and Jacqueline with her rambunctious, unruly boys. Their bond is tight, but it is not enough to keep Jacqueline, finally moving through the world in the body she has always wanted, from stealing a bit of Theresa’s perfect life.

HOT SPRINGS DRIVE is a dark, heart-pounding exploration of one woman’s deepest desires, and how the consequences of betrayal can ripple outward beyond the initial strike point. In her third, fiercest, and now hotly anticipated novel, acclaimed literary voice Lindsay Hunter deftly peels back the fragile veneer of two suburban families and the secrets roiling between them.

Lindsay Hunter is the author of two story collections and two novels. Her second collection, Don’t Kiss Me, was named one of Amazon’s 10 Best Books of the Year: Short Stories. Her latest novel, Eat Only When You’re Hungry, was a finalist for the 2017 Chicago Review of Books Fiction Award and a 2017 NPR Great Read. She lives in Chicago.

DEAD MEAT de Maya Fowler

When meat’s the only thing left to eat.

DEAD MEAT
by Maya Fowler
TBD
(via The Lennon-Ritchie Agency)

Fifteen year old Natalie has had a horror of blood and meat since the day her bother, Flynn now 17, raped her at age 9. Yet sheand her family (mother, Viv, former trophy wife, now hapless housewife; father, Ray, former accountant, now handyman; andgrandmother, Eleanor) are trapped on an enormous factory farm in a world where climate change has left plant cropsdevastatingly rare, and the Corporation ensures meat is virtually all there is to eat. With grains grown exclusively for raisingcattle, pigs and chicken for slaughter, and greens a black-market luxury, Natalie is emaciated, bitter and angry. She is desperateto escape, but electric fences and the draconian punishments of the Corporation stand in her way.

In contrast to his sister, Flynn is passive, complacent to the horrors of the farm, and hobbled by guilt and shame over the abuse.With a pet rat his only friend, he goes about the daily grind, wishing for a way to make amends to Natalie, who bristles at hisevery advance.

One night Flynn helps Natalie steal apples from the farmer’s private orchard; the farmer’s devious, arrogant 11-year-old son,Brett, sees them and threatens to tell, which would get them killed. In a scuffle on a wall overlooking the free-range pig pen,Natalie pushes Brett to his death, where he is eaten alive by the pigs. Afterwards, the entire farm is in fear, wondering who mightbe blamed and put to death.

Quietly nightmarish and utterly gripping, the psychological horror DEAD MEAT has all the makings of a cult classic. It may besome time before you’re able to eat a bacon sandwich again.

Maya Fowler is a South African novelist, editor and translator, currently living in Vancouver, Canada. She is the author of the novels Patagonia, The Elephant in the Room and Tebatso Gaan See Toe. Her current focus is literary and general fiction, although she’s produced award-winning workfor young adults and children.

A SHORT LIFE de Nicky Greenwall

Two seemingly unrelated car accidents. The same night. The same stretch of twistng valley road.

A SHORT LIFE
by Nicky Greenwall
Penguin Random House South Africa, 2024
(via The Lennon-Ritchie Agency)

Nick’s best friend Adam has had an accident while drunk driving. Nick wants to protect him from prosecution and must convincehis wife Franky to keep the car crash a secret. But when Franky learns that her best friend was killed on the same night in aseparate accident, she is torn between supporting her husband or her best friend’s widower. Set in Cape Town, the pacy, twistythriller is told from multiple perspectives. For fans of Liane Moriarty’s; Nine Perfect Strangers and Big Little Lies; HarrietLane’s Her; and Liz Feldman’s hit Netlix series Dead to Me.

Nicky Greenwall is a former broadcaster, entertainment journalist and television producer. Her multi-award-nominated documentary series The Beautiful People – which tracks the lives of a group of foreign fashion models working in Cape Town – has now sold in the UK, Australia, Asia, Europe, Canada, The Middle East and Africa. As a print journalist Nicky has contributed to Elle, Marie Claire, Men’s Health, Glamour, Good Taste and The Sunday Times. A SHORT LIFE is her debut novel. She lives in Cape Town with her husband Robin Fryer, and their two children – Georgie and Riley.