Archives de catégorie : London 2024 Fiction

REMEMBER, REMEMBER d’Elle Machray

Gunpowder, treason and a plot to  destroy the British Empire…

REMEMBER, REMEMBER
by Elle Machray
HarperNorth, February 2024
(via Mushens Entertainment)

1770. Delphine lives in the shadows of London: a secret, vibrant world of smugglers, courtesans and small rebellions. Four years ago, she escaped enslavement at great personal cost. Now, she must help her brother Vincent do the same.

While Britain’s highest court fails to administer justice for Vincent, little rebellions are no longer enough. What’s needed is a big, explosive plot – one that will strike at the heart of the transatlantic slave trade. But can one Black woman, one fuse and one match bring down an Empire?

An incendiary alternative history, REMEMBER, REMEMBER is a gripping story of conscience, conspiracy, queer identity and courage in the face of injustice.

Elle Machray (she/they) lives in Edinburgh and studied Politics at the University of Leeds. Elle started writing in lockdown and was selected to join the inaugural cohort of the HarperCollins Author Academy in 2021. In the moments between working and writing, Elle practices karate and explores the beauty of Scotland with their dog, Bruce.

BOMBSHELL de Rebecca Lewis Smith

BOMBSHELL is the story of Kate, an ordinary woman who begins to suspect she’s been used as an alibi by her childhood best friend, famed movie star Lena Fontaine, when the murder of Lena’s much older male co-star and rumoured lover explodes onto the news.

BOMBSHELL
by Rebecca Lewis Smith
TBD
(via Mushens Entertainment)

Scraping rock-bottom after a painful divorce, Kate hardly bats an eyelid when her childhood best friend whisks her away to Ibiza at a moment’s notice. That’s Lena Fontaine, after all – movie star, sex symbol, supportive friend. But then the news breaks that Jimmy Carvell, Lena’s much older, long-time co-star – and rumoured lover – has been shot in his London home, and the internet explodes.

Kate is disgusted by the accusations flying around online suggesting that Lena had something to do with the crime, reporting every post she sees and doing her best not to entertain the vitriolic speculation. Lena is distraught – and after all, Kate knows her. She could never do something like that.

Then CCTV footage of Lena leaving Jimmy’s home the morning of the murder is leaked. As it quickly becomes clear that Lena might be more involved than she’s letting on, Kate can’t help but wonder – did Lena invite Kate on their whirlwind trip to provide herself with an alibi? Why won’t Lena tell Kate, or the police, why she was at the house that morning?

Kate has long lived in the shadow of her best friend – even long before ‘Lena Fontaine’ existed, and she was just Helen, from down the road. But now, Lena is in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons, and Kate must decide whether she can trust her oldest and closest friend, even when all the evidence points to her being a murderer…

Rebecca Lewis Smith grew up splitting time between the UK, Massachusetts, and Norway. She studied Drama at the University of East Anglia, and settled in Norfolk, where she now writes. Rebecca co-founded a digital marketing agency in her twenties, growing it to a thriving, well-regarded local employer. As she was able to step away from the day-to-day running of the business, she delighted in rediscovering her creative core, and her joy in writing. She completed a fiction course with the National Centre for Writing in 2021, and in 2022 gained a place on the selective Curtis Brown Creative six-month novel writing course.

THE MOST de Jessica Anthony

A tightly wound, consuming tale for readers of Claire Keegan and Ian McEwan, about a 1950s American housewife who decides to get into the pool in her family’s apartment complex one morning and won’t come out.

THE MOST
by Jessica Anthony
Little, Brown & Co, July 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

It is an unseasonably warm Sunday in November 1957. Katheen, a college tennis champion turned Delaware housewife, decides not to join her flagrantly handsome life insurance salesman husband, Virgil, or their two young boys, at church. Instead, she takes a dip in the kidney-shaped swimming pool of their apartment complex. And then she won’t come out.

A consuming, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, The Most breaches the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath. As Sputnik 2 orbits the earth carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, Kathleen and Virgil hurtle towards each other until they arrive at a reckoning that will either shatter their marriage, or transform it, at last, into something real.

Jessica Anthony has been a butcher in Alaska, an unlicensed masseuse in Poland, and a secretary in San Francisco. In 2017, while writing Enter the Aardvark, Anthony was working as Bridge Guard, guarding the Maria Valeria Bridge between Sturovo, Slovakia and Esztergom, Hungary. Normally, she lives in Maine and teaches at Bates College.

THE GINNY SUITE de Stacy Skolnik

“A Handmaid‘s Tale for the Post-Truth-AI-Surveillance Era.” —Suzanne Treister, author of Hexen 2.0.

THE GINNY SUITE
by Stacy Skolnik
Montez Press, June 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

A mysterious global syndrome is affecting women, causing symptoms of submissiveness and aphasia. While the number of sufferers grows, so does our protagonist’s paranoia—of the media, her doctors, and her husband. In the age of misinformation, AI, and surveillance, THE GINNY SUITE asks how much—and who—we’re willing to sacrifice in the name of progress.

“Perversely brilliant, fearlessly inventive, The Ginny Suite beautifully illustrates the horror of being a thinking person inside of a body and culture rushing toward the graveyard.” —Brad Phillips, author of Essays and Fictions

“THE GINNY SUITE is a perfect hell of a book: a gossipy stylish mystery that’s both petty and profound. I love how its paranoias and insecurities tip lushly into plot: is the lyric condition of poetry a pathology? Is dissociation a radical response to the lived conditions of patriarchy, or is it patriarchy hacking your brain into submission? What if, instead of self-diagnosing through google, your search history was used to diagnose you, and form the basis of covert treatment? Its prose moves seamlessly from the lush to the blunt, awash with glitching pronouns, horny ennui, sci-fi intrigue and tender girlish digital fantasies. I adored it.” —Daisy Lafarge, author of Paul

“THE GINNY SUITE is formally innovative, a great read.” —Constance DeJong, author of Modern Love

Stacy Skolnik is the author of the poetry collection mrsblueeyes123.com (self-released, 2019), the chaplet Sparrows (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2023), the workbook From the Punitive to the Ludic: Prompts for Writing Public Apologies (with Thomas Laprade as Montez Press Radio, KAJE, 2022), and the chapbook Rat Park (with Katie Della-Valle, Montez Press, 2018). Her writing has been featured in journals and magazines such as Lambda Literary, The Operating System, Fjords, and Pfeil, among others. She is a cofounder and co-director of Montez Press Radio, the Lower East Side-based broadcast and performance platform.

THE LAST ONE AT THE WEDDING de Jason Rekulak

The author of Hidden Pictures returns with a deliciously twisty new thriller about a mysterious family and the lengths parents will go to protect their children.

THE LAST ONE AT THE WEDDING
by Jason Rekulak
Flatiron, October 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Meet Frank Szatowski, a widowed UPS driver in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. He has spent the last three years estranged from his adult daughter Maggie—but as our story opens, Maggie calls home to announce that she’s getting married, and she wants her father to walk her down the aisle.

Maggie is marrying into one of the wealthiest families in the United States, and Frank is overjoyed for a chance to finally reconnect. But then he makes some alarming discoveries about his future son-in-law, Aidan Gardner, and learns that Aidan’s previous girlfriend has gone missing. Is Maggie about to make a fatal mistake? And can Frank express his concerns to his daughter without losing her all over again?

Set over a three-day wedding weekend on a lake in New Hampshire, THE LAST ONE AT THE WEDDING features all the same storytelling that made Hidden Pictures an international bestseller: a murder mystery, class warfare, lots of heart, and big surprises around every corner.

Jason Rekulak is the author of the international bestselling thriller Hidden Pictures (winner of the 2022 Goodreads Choice Award for Horror) and The Impossible Fortress (an Edgar Award finalist). His novels have been translated into more than 30 languages. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and children.