Archives de catégorie : Fiction

CHAIN OF CAUSE de Kurt Ellis

A fast-paced blackly-comic thriller about a group of four friends who attempt to commit insurance fraud worth millions. This dark caper is for fans of In Bruges, Get Shorty and A Serious Man.

CHAIN OF CAUSE
by Kurt Ellis
Penguin Random House South Africa, April 2024
(via The Lennon-Ritchie Agency)

Fast paced blackly-comic thriller about a group of four friends who attempt to commit insurance fraud worth millions. Unfortunately, the friends make one mistake and poor decision after another putting them on a collision course with a relentless Ukrainian fraud investigator, a psychopathic American hitman, a ruthless local drug lord, and an Eastern European mobster.
Gabriel, passed over for promotion, decides to set up his own business. The business is a spectacular failure and he loses everything. Desperate and furious, he enlists his best friend Skellie, a conman, drug addict and drug dealer, to help him strike back at the institution that he feels has wronged him. Forced to enlist help on the inside, the mistakes come thick and fast and as the bodies pile up, Gabriel and Skellie do their best to make it out of their scheme alive.
A novel about injustices—historical, racial, gender, economic, and social—and an indictment of the practices in the financial industry in which Ellis has almost two decades of experience.

WGSA Muse Award winner Kurt Ellis is a screenwriter and novelist. Ellis is the author of the Johannesburg-set thrillers By Any Means (NB Publishing) and In the Midst of Wolves (Penguin Books). Winner of the Harry Oppen-heimer Creative Writing Award, Ellis has an MFA from the University of the Witwatersrand. Nominated for four 2021 WGSA Muse Awards, Ellis – a master at building tension through pacy plotting and nuanced characterization – won with his original pilot script Rainbow’s End.

HELL OF A COUNTRY de David Cornwell

In 1970s South Africa, desire and desperation have bloody consequences.

HELL OF A COUNTRY
by David Cornwell
(via The Lennon-Ritchie Agency)

Seventeen-year-old Lorraine van Niekerk despises the fact that her boss and lover, middle-aged André Bekker, won’t leave his hateful wife for her.
Driver Alfie Geemooi is horrified when he wakes up in Groote Schuur’s Non-White wing after a car crash with one leg missing.
Alfie and Lorraine’s lives intersect fatefully in André’s consultation rooms. André is an orthopaedic technician, and Lorraine can grant access to the prothesis Alfie so desperately needs.
But at a price.
HELL OF A COUNTRY is a fictionalised retelling of the Scissors Murder—a famous true-crime story from early 1970s South Africa. A pacy and poetic work told in the third person from multiple points of view, it focuses on the meeting-point between political machinery and personal desire, and uses the true-crime genre to tell a fresh and original story about South Africa’s turbulent past in a deeply human and engaging way.

David Cornwell’s debut novel, LIKE IT MATTERS, was published by Penguin Random House in South Africa to critical acclaim. The book was longlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize and shortlisted for the 9mobile Award for Best African Fiction Debut. David’s short film, Die Onderspit, was developed as part of KykNET’s Silwerskermfees festival program. He also co-wrote a screenplay with Damon Galgut. David’s feature film Pou (Peacock) was shown at Idyllwild, the Buffalo International Festival, the Winter Film Awards, Razor Reel and at SA Horror Fest. Born in Grahamstown, he currently lives in Johannesburg.

A WINTER’S RIME de Carol Dunbar

A harrowing and emotional novel set in rural Wisconsin—A WINTER’S RIME explores the impact of generational trauma, and one woman’s journey to find peace and healing from the violence of her past.

A WINTER’S RIME
by Carol Dunbar
Forge, September 2023
(via The Lark Group)

Mallory Moe is a twenty-five-year-old veteran Army mechanic, living with her girlfriend, Andrea, and working overnights at a gas station store while figuring out what’s next. Andrea’s off-grid cabin provides a perfect sanctuary for Mallory, a synesthete with a hypersensitivity to sound that can trigger flashbacks from her childhood.
The getaway that’s largely abandoned during the off season starts out idyllic, until Andrea’s once-loving behavior turns controlling and abusive, and Mallory once again finds herself not wanting to go home. After a particularly disturbing altercation, Mallory escapes into the subzero night and stumbles into Shay, a teenage girl, injured and asking for help. But it isn’t long before she realizes that Shay isn’t the only one who needs saving.
A story about sisterhood and second chances, A WINTER’S RIME looks to nature to find what it can teach us about bearing hardship and expanding our capacity to forgive—not just others, but ourselves.

Carol Dunbar is a ghostwriter of over 50 nonfiction titles, and for the last 15 years she has lived in the house that is the setting for The Net Beneath Us. Her essays about living off the grid air on Wisconsin Public Radio and her work has been published or is forthcoming in The South Carolina Review, Midwestern Gothic, The Midwest Review, Literary Mama, Great Lakes Review, and others. In 2018 she won the Hal Prize for fiction and an earlier draft of this novel was a 2013 finalist for the Dana Award.

THE LIBRARIAN OF LOST STORIES de Janet Skeslien Charles

From the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of The Paris Library comes THE LIBRARIAN OF LOST STORIES, a powerful historical novel that charts the lives of two NYPL librarians across the barrier of decades.

THE LIBRARIAN OF LOST STORIES
by Janet Skeslien Charles
Atria Books, April 2024
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights)

1918. World War I. Northern France is a battlefield. The American Committee for Devastated France establish their headquarters just miles from the front. This group of international women help French families who’ve lost everything – homes, livelihoods, and limbs. They save children, restore bombed villages, and evacuate civilians.
Jessie « Kit » Carson takes a leave of absence from the NYPL in order to establish something that the French have never seen – children’s libraries – as well as to escape her boss. She turns ambulances into bookmobiles, creates libraries, and trains the first French female librarians. Then she disappears.
1987. Wendy Peterson stumbles across a mention of Jessie Carson in the NYPL archives and becomes consumed with learning her fate. Fixation is nothing new to Wendy. She’s obsessed with Roberto, her handsome coworker. She worries about her best friend, Leigh, who grows more and more distant. Wendy soon learns that she and Jessie Carson have more in common than their work at the New York Public Library.
With a dazzling cast of real-life characters, THE LIBRARIAN OF LOST STORIES highlights themes of resilience, friendship, and community. Once again, Janet Skeslien Charles brings history alive with this meticulously researched, little-known story of incredible women who face the danger of war to share their love of literature and their belief in books as bridges.

Janet Skeslien Charles’s work has been translated into 35 languages. Her novel about real-life librarians during World War II, The Paris Library, was a New York Times bestseller, #1 Indie Next Pick, and book club favorite. Janet has spoken at over 200 literary events and has been a keynote speaker for venues such as the Association of American Women in Europe commemoration and the Salem Literary Festival. Her debut novel Moonlight in Odessa was translated into 12 languages. She spends her free time at the Red Wheelbarrow bookshop in Paris.

QUALITY TIME de Suzannah Showler

A literary love story of Millennial discontent that explores how far two people can go inventing their own parallel reality—with raccoons.

QUALITY TIME
by Suzannah Showler
McClelland & Stewart/PRH Canada, May 2023
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Ferociously in love and in their own universe, Lydie and Nico’s first year together was so beautiful that they’ve been recreating it, day by day, ever since. The anniversaries, sometimes elaborate, sometimes small, become the couples’ own internal logic, tethering them to a reality they’ve built together.
But the real world is starting to creep in. As the people around them start to get married, get pregnant, get serious, Lydie wonders what it is they’re really doing—and why it leaves her so little time to focus on what she moved to the city for: creating art. Meanwhile, Nico experiences a divine event that convinces him the anniversaries matter more than ever, and in the city around them, the urban wildlife is rising up on a mission of their own.
A vivid time capsule of recession-era Toronto, Quality Time is a universal story of self-discovery and invention, capturing that rare, innocent time when we feel like masters of our own fate, and what happens when the real world starts to press in from the edges.

Suzannah Showler is the author of Most Dramatic Ever, a book of cultural criticism about The Bachelor (ECW 2018), and the poetry collections Thing is (McClelland & Stewart 2017) and Failure to Thrive (ECW 2014). You can read her work in the New York Times Magazine, Slate, the Walrus, Hazlitt, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. She is the poetry editor for Maisonneuve. She also does contingent labour teaching creative writing. She currently lives on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded land of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations with her partner, Andrew Battershill.