Archives de catégorie : London 2025 Fiction

THE EMPTY CRADLE de Lisa Rookes

A completely gripping and chilling suspense novel, with a shocking twist.

THE EMPTY CRADLE
by Lisa Rookes
Orion, August 2025
(via Northbank Talent Management)

Amy’s so sure that her husband, Joel, is deeply invested in their future together. After all, it’s his dream of a family together that has them trying so hard to have a baby, despite a series of disappointments. It’s this certainty that leaves Amy absolutely floored when she learns of Joel’s affair with her best friend.

Heartbroken and horrified, Amy flees to a dilapidated cottage in a Yorkshire village, a place she’d bought with dreams of making it feel homey and warm. In the new village, she feels like a clear outsider, but a group of local women soon take her under their wing. They gather for a routine book club, they say. Before Amy knows it, these women are in her life, and in her home.

Amy wakes one night to find herself outside in the fields. Strange offerings seem to be left on her doorstep. And the surveillance camera she installs shows shapes creeping around her house in the night. Strangest of all, she suddenly finds she’s pregnant. A pregnancy that feels like a cruel joke.

The book club is incredibly invested in Amy’s pregnancy. And it might just be in Amy’s mind, but the women’s interest doesn’t always seem safe. What do the women want with her? And what do they want with her baby?

Lisa Rookes is an award-winning journalist and lecturer. She spent the start of her career as a crime reporter and news editor before moving to national newspapers and women’s magazines. She is currently head of the undergraduate Journalism programme at the University of Sheffield and has won further multiple awards for her teaching. She lives in Holmfirth in South Yorkshire with her two sons, an arthritic Labrador and a disabled pug.

BLOODFIRE, BABY d’Eirinie Carson

Nightbitch meets Motherthing meets the multigenerational aspect of Homegoing and the wild unhinged-ness of My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

BLOODFIRE, BABY
by Eirinie Carson
Dutton/PRH, Spring 2026
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

When her husband leaves for a work trip he cannot postpone, Sofia, a three-week post-partum new mother, suddenly finds herself alone with her as-yet unnamed daughter in a large house in a wealthy suburb in the Bay Area. She never expected to end up here, to live like this, and she thought it would all be, well, different. She thought mothering would come naturally to her, as it appeared to for every other mother she glimpsed out in the wild. Nobody seems willing or able to help her: not Emil, her absent husband; not Dominique, her childless best friend; not Buffy, Emil’s judgmental, waspy mother; not Edwina, Sofia’s mother whom she cut off long ago; and not Devon, her brother who moved across the country to get away from their messy, traumatic family life. Not even Amina, a friendly, put-together mom from her local park.

Sofia becomes a woman tormented by ghosts. As she slowly descends into loneliness, paranoia, anxiety, and, ultimately, sleep-deprived madness, she learns of an insidious ancestral haunting that has plagued the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter in her family. Before it becomes all too consuming, she must confront the history of the matriarchs in her bloodline dating back to 1700s colonized Jamaica.

What will Sofia do to protect her new baby, beleaguered by threats from all around? Who is this shadow that stalks her in the night? And what is she capable of? There isn’t anything she wouldn’t do, Sofia realizes—she’d even resort to bloody violence, if needed. And it seems to her that she just might need to.

Told in an irresistible, razor-sharp, charming voice and with a cutting wit, this is a maternal gothic story of the fourth trimester, of heritage and class, of the things our mothers pass along to us, good and bad, and of the types of mothers people set out to be versus the ones they actually become.

Eirinie Carson is a Black British writer living in California. She is a mother of two children. A member of the Writers Grotto in San Francisco, Eirinie is a frequent contributor to Mother magazine, and her work has also appeared in Lithub, Mortal Mag, The Sonora Review, and others. She was the NEA Distinguished Fellow at the Hambidge Center and is a 2024 alum at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Eirinie contributes to her local paper, The Argus Courier, via a column, Eirinie Asks. She mostly writes about motherhood, grief, and relationships, and her first book, The Dead Are Gods (Melville House, 2023) was critically acclaimed by Oprah Daily, Nylon Magazine, Shondaland, and The Washington Post as well as winning a Zibby Award. It was also named one of Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2023.

GODBLOODED d’Emma Theriault

A Fate Inked In Blood meets The Foxglove King in this high-spice, Celtic-inspired adult romantasy.

GODBLOODED (Book #1)
by Emma Theriault
Hodder & Stoughton, 2026
(via Laura Dail Literary)

Dunscane is a land surrounded by darkness, protected by the gods who holdback the ruin lurking in the Waste. When Anthea Damra is chosen by the goddess Morven to be her priestess her comfortable, aristocratic existence is traded for a life of degrading rituals, brutal sacrifices, and the goddess hearing her every thought. She knows she can’t trust anyone in the stronghold; not her brooding, handsome warden, Eamon, and certainly not Morven, ruthless and maternal by turns. Anthea is haunted by whispers about Ione, the priestess before her who failed in her duties.

To avoid the same fate, Anthea delves deeper into the mysteries surrounding Morven and her fellow deities. As their relationship grows, Anthea empathizes with the goddess more and more. Then Morven reveals the truth: the gods are not protectors, but prisoners, bound by an ancient pact that enslaves them to the whims of unknown powers. Horrified the goddess is also a captive, Anthea doesn’t hesitate when Morven asks her to take off the collar that binds her to the temple, allowing her to escape.

Forced to flee and brave the Waste alongside the notorious (and surprisingly charming) heretic Severin Cosgrave, he reveals to Anthea that all she knows is a lie. As Severin and Anthea become allies, and more, the secrets they unveil put targets on their backs. Darkness is creeping in, and Anthea discovers that her being chosen as Morven’s priestess was not as random as she once believed…and she may be the only one that can save Dunscane from ruin.

Emma Theriault ‘s YA fantasy debut, Rebel Rose, was a Canadian Children’s Book Centre starred selection for Best Books for Kids and Teens Fall 2021. Her debut adult historical romance, A Lady Would Know Better, came out in January 2025 from Entangled with two sequels to follow.

THE SADDEST GIRL ON THE BEACH de Heather Frese

Grieving her father’s death, Charlotte McConnell seeks solace at the Outer Banks inn owned by her best friend’s family, but she finds them dealing with their own family drama and soon lands in the center of an unexpected love triangle.

THE SADDEST GIRL ON THE BEACH
by Heather Frese
Blair Publishing, Spring 2024
(via Harvey Klinger, Inc.)

Her hotel family welcomes Charlotte with chowder dinners and a cozy room, but her friend Evie has a looming life change of her own, and soon Charlotte seeks other attractions to navigate her grief. Will she, like in some television movie, find her way back through a romance, or are there larger forces at play on Hatteras Island? Heather Frese, winner of the Lee Smith Novel Prize and author of The Baddest Girl on the Planet, sets Charlotte on a beautifully rendered course through human frailty and longing, unrelenting science, and the awesome forces of the Carolina coast.

“A metaphor-rich, coming-of-age, contemporary novel about finding your equilibrium while experiencing overwhelming grief.”—Booklist

Heather Frese’s debut novel, The Baddest Girl on the Planet, won the Lee Smith Novel Prize, was longlisted for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and was named one of the Women’s National Book Association’s Great Group Reads of 2021. She attended Ohio University for her M.A. followed by an M.F.A. in fiction from West Virginia University. A freelance writer, Heather worked with Outer Banks publications as well as publishing short fiction, essays, poetry, and interviews in various literary journals, including Michigan Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Review, Front Porch, the Barely South Review, Switchback, and elsewhere. Coastal North Carolina is her longtime love and source of inspiration, her writing deeply influenced by the wild magic and history of the Outer Banks. She currently writes, edits, and teaches in Raleigh, North Carolina.

WHILE THE GETTING IS GOOD de Matt Riordan

Amid the gangland wars of Prohibition, one fisherman’s long-shot play to secure his family’s future brings disaster to everyone he loves. Based partly on family lore, Matt Riordan’s follow-up to The North Line is for readers of Jeannette Wall’s Hang the Moon and S.A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed.

WHILE THE GETTING IS GOOD
by Matt Riordan
Hyperion Avenue, April 2025
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights)

Eld should’ve known better. Hell, he did know better. But watching lesser men hit big paydays—men who didn’t fight in Europe—grew unbearable. So, when the opportunity arises, he reaches for a little something extra for his family, and even more for himself. With Prohibition expiring in a matter of months, his turn from fisherman to rumrunner was supposed to be temporary. It seemed the perfect plan. Even Maggie, Eld’s normally sensible wife, is on board.

Things don’t go to plan. Amid the region’s players battle to capture the biggest piece of a shrinking pie, Eld’s tiny family operation is caught in the crossfire. One bitterly cold night packing whiskey across Lake Huron costs Eld dearly, and his family even more.

Hunted by gangsters and squeezed by the Depression, Eld, Maggie, and the children are scattered: Eld to Canada on a doomed quest, Maggie and her daughter forced into finding sanctuary in a faith more cult than religion. When they finally reunite, they may not even recognize each other as the same people who crossed their fingers and threw the dice for a shot at a better life.

Matt Riordan grew up in Michigan but spent his early twenties working on commercial fishing boats in Alaska. After college Matt drifted from commercial fishing through a variety of jobs before landing in law school. He became a litigator in New York City, where he practiced for twenty years. He now lives with his family in Australia.