Archives de catégorie : Frankfurt 2021 Adult Fiction

AFTER YOU WERE GONE de Vikki Wakefield

What happens to a family when a child goes missing? How far would you go to learn the truth? AFTER YOU WERE GONE is Vikki Wakefield’s first psychological thriller.

AFTER YOU WERE GONE
by Vikki Wakefield
Text Publishing Australia, September 2022

In a busy street market, Abbie lets go of six-year-old Sarah’s hand. She isn’t a bad mother, just exhausted. When she turns around, her daughter isn’t there. After a full-scale search and a highprofile investigation, there is still no trace of Sarah.
Six years later, Abbie is in love and getting married. Her family, despite their problems, have seen her through her worst imaginings—only Abbie’s mother seems unwilling to let her move on. Her fragile peace is constantly threatened: not knowing what happened to Sarah is like living with a curse.
Then a phone call from an unknown number offers closure. A man claims to know what happened to Sarah, but if Abbie tells anyone or fails to follow instructions, she’ll never find out. What price must Abbie pay to know the truth?

Vikki Wakefield writes fiction for young adults and adults. Her work explores family, class and relationships in a contemporary setting. Her novels All I Ever Wanted, Friday Brown, Inbetween Days and Ballad for a Mad Girl have been shortlisted for numerous awards. This is How We Change the Ending won Book of the Year: Older Readers, Children’s Book Council Awards, 2020. AFTER YOU WERE GONE is her first novel for adults. Vikki lives in Adelaide, Australia.

THE WAY IT IS NOW de Garry Disher

Set in a beach-shack town an hour from Melbourne, THE WAY IT IS NOW tells the story of a burnt-out cop named Charlie Deravin.

THE WAY IT IS NOW
by Garry Disher
Text Publishing (Australia), November 2021

Twenty years ago Charlie Deravin’s mother went missing near the family beach shack—believed murdered; body never found. His father has lived under a cloud of suspicion ever since. Now Charlie’s back living in the shack in Menlo Beach, on disciplinary leave from his job with the police sex-crimes unit, and permanent leave from his marriage. After two decades worrying away at the mystery of his mother’s disappearance, he’s run out of leads. Then the skeletal remains of two people are found in the excavation of a new building site—and the past comes crashing in on Charlie.
THE WAY IT IS NOW is the enthralling new novel by Garry Disher, one of Australia’s most loved and celebrated crime writers.

Garry Disher has published over fifty titles across multiple genres. With a growing international reputation for his best-selling crime novels, he has won four German and three Australian awards for best crime novel of the year, and been longlisted twice for a British CWA Dagger award. In 2018 he received the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award.

WEIRD TO EXIST d’Alison Zai

Vibrant yet darkly humorous comics for commiserating over life’s deepest concerns, from Instagram artist Alison Zai.

WEIRD TO EXIST:
Simple Comics About Complex Feelings
by Alison Zai
Ten Speed, April 2022

We all know the gut-wrenching pang that comes after accepting a beautiful moment will soon become a distant memory. We all get into cycles where it feels like the failures and disappointments just keep coming. Instagram comics artist Alison Zai presents WEIRD TO EXIST, a collection of 100 comics that depict these universal emotions and existential musings with great accuracy and empathy.
This bright, colorful book is divided into three intrinsic human acts—loving, creating, and existing–and, ultimately, comments on how weird it is to do all of that. Zai’s cheery anthropomorphic characters go through the motions of relationships, loneliness, creativity blocks, mental health concerns, social anxiety, and more. These comics voice the overwhelming dread and unpredictable chaos found in all aspects of being alive. With sharp levity and emotional complexity, WEIRD TO EXIST captures the feelings that are not easily communicated but widely felt. This collection features 30 never-before-published comics alongside a selection of beloved fan favorites from Zai’s Instagram account.

Alison Zai is a comics artist who has garnered success by sharing her art on Instagram and Tumblr. She lives in Los Angeles where she is expanding her career as an artist.

MANYWHERE de Morgan Thomas

Lush and uncompromising stories about characters crossing geographical borders and gender binaries.

MANYWHERE: Stories
by Morgan Thomas
mcd/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, January 2022
(via Defiore & Company)

The nine stories in Morgan Thomas’s shimmering debut collection MANYWHERE witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, at whatever cost. As each character traces deceit and violence through tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, and history, and the sometimes ruthless awakenings of self-discovery.
A trans woman finds her independence through the purchase of a pregnancy bump. A young Virginian flees their relationship, choosing instead to immerse themselves in the life of an intersex person from colonial-era Jamestown. A young writer tries to evade the murky and violent legacy of an ancestor, who supposedly disappeared into a midwifery bag. And in the uncanny title story, a young trans person brings home a replacement daughter for their elderly father.
Winding between reinvention and remembrance, transition and transcendence, these origin stories rebound across centuries. With warm, meticulous emotional intelligence, Morgan Thomas’s MANYWHERE uncovers how the stories we borrow to understand ourselves in turn shape the people we become. Ushering in a new form of queer mythmaking, MANYWHERE introduces a storyteller of uncommon range and talent.

Morgan Thomas’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, VICE, Joyland, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, them., and StoryQuarterly, where their story won the 2019 Fiction Prize. They are the recipient of a Bread Loaf Work-Study Grant, a Fullbright Grant, the Penny Wilkes Scholarship in Writing and the Environment, and the winner of the inaugural Southern Studies Fellowship in Arts and Letters. They have also received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Arctic Circle. A graduate of the University of Oregon MFA program, they live in Portland.

IN HER BOOTS de KJ Dell’Antonia

The new novel by New York Times bestselling author of The Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick The Chicken Sisters.

IN HER BOOTS
by KJ Dell’Antonia
Putnam, July 2022
(via Defiore & Company)

What if her mother was right about her all along? Rhett Smith fled the woman who taught her to protect her heart, hide her feelings and trust no one except herself for two decades of adventurous work, travel and reinvention, relying on her tougher alter ego, The Modern Pioneer Girl, for support and guidance, then wrote a popular book about it.
Now the MPG (aka Maggie Strong, Rhett’s pen name) is in hot demand while Rhett’s bold ex-pat life implodes with the end of her relationship and the death of her beloved grandmother. When the opportunity to step into her new fame arises, Rhett falters—and then, with her mother’s voice literally in her ear, shoves her best friend Jasmine on stage in her place.
But what seemed like a good idea at the time snowballs into chaos when the farm turns out to be headed for the auction block. Suddenly, Rhett’s mother is again in charge of her destiny, and nothing goads Rhett into impulsive action like feeling out of control—or possibly the re-appearance of her first love, now in the role of her mother’s henchman. She’ll do anything to take back her inheritance, and Jasmine, trying to escape her own disappointments, is more than willing to continue their ruse for as long as it takes. Together they concoct a scheme that will help them both recover all they’ve lost—but not exactly in the way they expect.

KJ Dell’Antonia is a writer and a regular contributor to the New York Times, where she wrote and edited the Motherlode blog from 2011 until 2016 and was a contributing editor to the Well Family section from 2016-2017. Prior to this, she was one of Slate’s XX Factor bloggers and a contributor to Slate, where she covered parenting and a broad range of subjects, from legal issues to pop culture. KJ lives in Lyme, New Hampshire, with her husband and four children.