Archives de catégorie : Literary

THE GHOST OF SAM WEBSTER de Craig Higginson

At once a murder mystery, a war novel and a moving investigation into what it is to be human.

THE GHOST OF SAM WEBSTER
by Craig Higginson
Picador Africa, 2023
(via The Lennon-Ritchie Agency)

Daniel Hawthorne is drawn to Zululand by the ghost of Sam Webster, a seventeen-year-old girl who went missing from her family’s luxury lodge and whose body was seen a week later on the Buffalo River.
As Daniel tries to get to the truth of what might have happened to Sam, he also starts to write the story of his disgraced ancestor, Lieutenant Charles Hawthorne, the notorious coward who was accused of three times abandoning his fellow men at the height of the conflict during the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879.
Nothing is as it seems, however. As Daniel gains access to the carefully concealed secrets of his ancestor and of the whole Webster family, the lines between betrayal and loyalty, love and hate, cowardice and moral courage become blurred. Written in Craig Higginson’s stark and indelible prose, THE GHOST OF SAM WEBSTER is a novel that plunges into the darkest recesses of human endeavour and emerges with an irrepressible humanity and hard-won hope.

Craig Higginson is an internationally acclaimed playwright and novelist. His plays have been performed and produced in many theatres and festivals around the world. His novels include Last Summer, The Landscape Painter, The Dream House and The White Room. Craig has won several national awards in South Africa and Britain for his writing.

THE ALPHABETICAL DIARIES de Sheila Heti

A habitual diarist radically compresses and reorders ten years of life, asking not how a person should be, but how a person is.

THE ALPHABETICAL DIARIES
by Sheila Heti
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Spring 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

“A little more than 10 years ago, I began looking back at the diaries I had kept over the previous decade. I wondered if I’d changed. So I loaded all 500,000 words of my journals into Excel to order the sentences alphabetically. Perhaps this would help me identify patterns and repetitions. How many times had I written, I hate him, for example? With the sentences untethered from narrative, I started to see the self in a new way: as something quite solid, anchored by shockingly few characteristic preoccupations. As I returned to the project over the years, it grew into something more novelistic. I blurred the characters and cut thousands of sentences, to introduce some rhythm and beauty. When I was asked about a work of fiction that could be serialized, I thought of these diaries: The self’s report on itself is surely a great fiction, and what is a more fundamental mode of serialization than the alphabet? After some editing, here is the result.” —Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including How Should a Person Be?, which New York Magazine deemed one of the “New Classics of the 21st century.” She was named one of “The New Vanguard” by The New York Times book critics, who, along with a dozen other magazines and newspapers, chose Motherhood as a top book of 2018. Her books have been translated into twenty-one languages.

THE IDLE STANCE OF THE TIPPLER PIGEON de Safinah Danish Elahi

A beautifully rendered portrait of love, healing, and long-buried pain, digging deep into the nature of trauma and class division. Perfect for readers of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, and The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak.

THE IDLE STANCE OF THE TIPPLER PIGEON
by Safinah Danish Elahi
Neem Tree Press, May 2023
(via Randle Editorial & Literary)

Zohaib, Misha and Nadia believed they would be in each other’s lives forever. As children they played, argued, teased and loved one another. Yet nothing could have prepared them for the tragic turn of events one fateful afternoon in Karachi, Pakistan, when the divisions and differences between them are revealed.
Years later and they are still trying to piece their lives back together, still trying to make sense of what happened. Zohaib is living in London, haunted by the ghosts of the past. Nadia has escaped the household where she first met Misha and Zohaib but finds fate delivering her back to their door…

Safinah Danish Elahi is a lawyer, writer and poet. She is the author of two books, The Unbridled Romance of Love and Pain and Eye on the Prize, a novel which is being adapted for tv. Safinah is also the founder of Reverie Publishers, an independent press based in Pakistan. Recently, she was selected for the Iowa Writing Program Fall Residency 2022.

THE CURATION OF EAMON O’REILLY de Hugh Blackthorne

A remarkable literary debut about a young genderfluid man who escapes his difficult life in Cork to chase his dreams of fashion and modelling in London, for fans of Garth Greenwell and Swimming in the Dark.

THE CURATION OF EAMON O’REILLY
by Hugh Blackthorne
Publication: TBD
(via Northbank Talent Management)

Genderfluid Eamon Kastellakis wants to be beautiful. More than anything, he dreams of wearing couture dresses by the designers he worships, Alexander McQueen and Gucci, well away from the roar and threat of his alcoholic Greek da in their decaying house in Cork, Ireland.
At a turning point following his seventeenth birthday, Eamon gives himself the gift he’s always wanted: freedom. But running away to fashion capital London isn’t the end of his troubles – it’s only the beginning. Eamon’s given survival pro tips – where rent’s cheap, where a lad might find some work under the table – by an odd girl who’s on the run herself. He lives in a slum house, a step up from the streets, struggling to make his way. The world of fashion seems an unattainable dream for a runaway.
Eamon slowly starts to build a life for himself in a new country away from his da. But as soon as Eamon’s modelling dreams are in sight, with runways ahead, his da falls ill. Eamon faces a painful choice between returning home to care for him or staying in London to pursue his fashion dreams – and he stands to lose everything he’s fought for.

Hugh Blackthorne is a queer trans writer of LGBTQ fiction and poetry. His writing has been published by several journals, and in 2020, THE CURATION OF EAMON O’REILLY was Runner Up in the BPA First Novel Award. In 2019, his writing was longlisted for both the Bath Novel Award and the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) Nonfiction Prize. His writing has received funding support from the Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council. His work in museums and archaeology provide plenty of inspiration for his writing, along with his experiences living and working in Canada and the UK, and his travels. He often writes on themes of queer identity, belonging, and found family. Hugh currently lives in Victoria, BC, Canada.

JONATHAN ABERNATHY YOU ARE KIND de Molly McGhee

At once tender, startling, and deeply funny, JONATHAN ABERNATHY YOU ARE KIND is a gimlet-eyed reckoning with late-stage capitalism, a brilliant, ferocious novel for readers of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This.

JONATHAN ABERNATHY YOU ARE KIND
by Molly McGhee
‎ Atra, Fall 2023
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Jonathan Abernathy is screwed. Jobless, behind on his student loan payments, and a self-declared failure, the only thing Abernathy has in abundance is debt. When a government loan forgiveness program offers him a job he can do literally in his sleep, he thinks he’s found his big break. That is, until he finds himself auditing the dreams of white collar workers, flagging their anxieties and preoccupations for removal.
As Abernathy finds his footing in this new role, reality and morality begin to warp around him. Soon, the lines between life and work, love and hate, right and wrong, even sleep and consciousness, have blurred.

“Molly McGhee reminds me of absolutely no one. Here’s an original mind brimming over with invention and comic ferocity and a new world sensibility that serves to remind us what good hands the future of literature is in. I am hugely excited for everyone to read this mad, hilarious writer.” —Ben Marcus, Guggenheim Fellow and author of The Flame Alphabet

Molly McGhee is from a cluster of unincorporated towns outside of Nashville, Tennessee. She completed her M.F.A. in fiction at Columbia University, where, in addition to receiving a Chair’s Fellowship, she taught in the undergraduate creative writing department. She has worked in the editorial departments of McSweeney’s, The Believer, NOON, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Tor. Currently living in Brooklyn, her work has appeared in The Paris Review.