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.
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