Archives de catégorie : Fiction

SINKHOLE, AND OTHER INEXPLICABLE VOIDS de Leyna Krow

A darkly fabulist story collection about women’s choices, complicity, and power and the lack thereof (with screen rights to the title story « Sinkhole » sold to Jordan Peele and Universal).

SINKHOLE, AND OTHER INEXPLICABLE VOIDS
by Leyna Krow
Viking, Summer 2024
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

Credit: Young Kwak photo

From a genie, a devil, time travelers, a thief in peril, an oversized baby, an exploding woman, a woman with an impossible sinkhole in her yard, a woman who gives birth to a wild child, and more, this collection explores women in power – or in a deficit of power — to confront questions of complicity and intent, hysteria, paranoia, and what makes us whole in a world with relative values. With unsettling insight and echoes of Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link and Laura van den Berg, SINKHOLE, AND OTHER INEXPLICABLE VOIDS traces peripheral, upside down spaces in which sometimes there is a choice to be made, rules to be broken, risks to be tried, even crimes to be had, for the sake of a woman’s unconditional freedom.

Leyna Krow’s first collection I’M FINE, BUT YOU APPEAR TO BE SINKING (Featherproof Books, 2017) was a finalist for The Believer Book Award. Krow lives in Spokane, Washington with her husband and two children. She is at work on her second novel

FOR LOVE OF MAGIC de Simon R. Green

History isn’t what you think it is. It’s been rewritten to remove all the magic. Together, two people decide to put things right. A new novel of magic, history and true love from Simon R. Green.

FOR LOVE OF MAGIC
by Simon R. Green
Baen, May 2023
(via JABberwocky)

When they fall in love, it’s magic!
History can change and has changed. Magic was and is real.
Once upon a time, there was a forgotten era of magic and monster. But the remnants—and all memory—of the old world have been replaced by the sane, the scientific, and the rational. But sometimes the magical past isn’t content to stay past. That’s where Jack Daimon comes in. It’s his joy to protect our present from the supernatural remnants of an earlier time, a different history. It’s his job to make the past safe.
Jack is called to the Tate Museum, where dozens of people have disappeared beneath the surface of a painting. While investigating, he finds himself smitten with a mysterious art expert, Amanda Fielding. But Amanda has plans of her own, and soon the two are traveling through time—back to the Roman Empire and then forward through history, from King Arthur’s court to Sherwood Forest. As they explore histories past as written and overwritten, the balance of magic and science shifts, and the choices the two make could change the world forever.

Simon R. Green is the New York Times best-selling author of more than sixty science fiction, fantasy, and mystery novels. Green sold his first book in 1988 and the very next year was commissioned to write the best-selling novelization of the Kevin Costner film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. From there he went on to write many more series of books, including Deathstalker, Nightside, Secret History, Forest Kingdom, and the Ishmael Jones mysteries. His books have sold more than 3.8 million copies worldwide and have been translated into more than a dozen different languages.

LIKE THE APPEARANCE OF HORSES d’Andrew Krivak

A novel of one family, a century of war, and the promise of homecoming from Dayton Literary Peace Prize winner and National Book Award finalist Andrew Krivak.

LIKE THE APPEARANCE OF HORSES
by Andrew Krivak
Bellevue Press, May 2023
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights)

Rooted in the small, mountain town of Dardan, Pennsylvania, where patriarch Jozef Vinich settled after surviving World War I, LIKE THE APPEARANCE OF HORSES immerses us in the intimate lives of a family whose fierce bonds have been shaped by the great conflicts of the past century.
After Bexhet Konar escapes fascist Hungary and crosses the ocean to find Jozef, the man who saved his life in 1919, he falls in love with Jozef’s daughter, Hannah, enlists in World War II, and is drawn into a personal war of revenge. Many years later, their youngest son, Samuel, is taken prisoner in Vietnam and returns home with a heroin addiction and deep physical and psychological wounds. As Samuel travels his own path toward healing, his son will graduate from Annapolis as a Marine on his way to Iraq.
In spare, breathtaking prose, LIKE THE APPEARANCE OF HORSES  is the freestanding, culminating novel in Andrew Krivak’s award-winning Dardan Trilogy, which began with The Sojourn and The Signal Flame. It is a story about borders drawn within families as well as around nations, and redrawn by ethnicity, prejudice, and war. It is also a tender story of love and how it is tested by duty, loyalty, and honor.

“Subtle and nuanced.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“Krivak’s resplendent multigenerational family saga expertly braids the horrors of war with the struggles of those waiting for loved ones to return home.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Krivak impresses with this layered story of deferred homecomings and the elusive nature of peace.” —Publishers Weekly

Andrew Krivak is the author of The Bear, a Mountain Book Competition winner and NEA Big Read selection, and the novels of the Dardan Trilogy: The Sojourn, a National Book Award finalist and winner of both the Chautauqua Prize and Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and The Signal Flame, a Chautauqua Prize finalist. He lives with his wife and three children in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

THE NATURALIST OF AMSTERDAM de Melissa Ashley

Set in 1700s Amsterdam, this historical novel explores the life of entomologist and artist Maria Sibylla Merian’s daughter Dorothea Graff.

THE NATURALIST OF AMSTERDAM
by Melissa Ashley
Affirm Press (Australia), September 2023
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights)

Credit: David Merrylees

Set in 1700s Amsterdam, The Naturalist of Amsterdam follows the life of Dorothea Graff, daughter of the famed artist and naturalist, Maria Sybilla Merian. From her early years within the confines of the Labadist community of Walter Schloss to her mother’s artist studio in Amsterdam and the wilds of South America, Dorothea’s story charts an amazingly rich and colourful period of discovery and explores the challenge of being the offspring of one of the most famous female artists in history. For as long as she can remember, Dorothea Graff has served her scientist-artist mother, Maria Sibylla Merian, in the family atelier with her older sister Hanna.
At just twenty years old, Dorothea decides to join her mother on a once in a lifetime expedition to the Dutch Colony of Suriname to observe and paint its insect and plant life. A commercial artist, businesswoman and printmaker, Maria has previously published illustrated volumes of her studies of European butterflies and plants, but entranced by displays of Suriname insects in the collections of Amsterdam’s rich burgher merchant-traders, Maria decides to travel to their source, where she will conduct studies in their habitat to feature them in a magnificent, hand-coloured publication.
All Maria and Dorothea’s savings have been ploughed into the expedition, which is fraught with danger and peril, but fame and greatness are never achieved without enormous sacrifice and suffering – The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname will one day make Maria world-famous.
THE NATURALIST OF AMSTERDAM asks the question: who are we really outside of our work, and given another chance at happiness, should we take it?

Melissa Ashley is a writer, poet, birder and academic who tutors in poetry and creative writing at the University of Queensland in Australia. Her first novel, The Birdman’s Wife, has been printed in three formats and sold more than 35,000 copies in Australia, and her follow-up novel The Bee and the Orange Tree was also a bestseller. She lives in Brisbane, Australia.

I ONLY READ MURDER de Ian & Will Ferguson

A once-beloved television sleuth finds herself far from Hollywood and witness to a murder during a small-town theatre production—and is convinced it’s up to her to solve the case. Introducing a new comedic crime series from the bestselling Ferguson brothers, in the vein of Richard Osman, Simon Brett, Alexander McCall Smith’s 44 Scotland Street Series, and Schitt’s Creek.

I ONLY READ MURDER
by Ian Ferguson & Will Ferguson
HarperCollins Canada, June 2023

Miranda Abbott, once known for the crime-solving, karate-chopping church pastor she played on network television, has hit hard times. Turned down for a role on a cable reality show, Miranda is facing ruin when a mysterious postcard arrives, summoning her to Happy Rock, a small town in the Pacific Northwest. But when she gets there, nothing is what she expected.
In dire straits, she signs up for an amateur production at the Happy Rock Little Theatre, competing against the local real estate agent for the lead role. On opening night, one of the actors is murdered, live, in front of the audience. But out of 100 witnesses, no one actually saw what happened. Now everyone is under a cloud of suspicion, including the sardonic town doctor, the local high-school drama teacher, an oil-stained car mechanic, an elderly gentleman who may or may not have been in the CIA—and Miranda herself. Clearly, the only way to solve this mystery is for Miranda to summon her skills as television’s Pastor Fran and draw on the help of her new sidekick, Susan, a shy bookstore clerk who seems to know everyone’s secrets. Because the show must go on!

Ian Ferguson won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for Village of the Small Houses and is the co-author, with his brother, Will, of How to Be a Canadian, which was shortlisted for the Leacock Medal and won the CBA Libris Award for non-fiction. A writer and creative director in the film and television industry, he lives in Victoria.
Will Ferguson is a three-time winner of the Leacock Medal for Humour. His novels include his debut, HappinessTM, sold in twenty-three languages; 419, which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize; and The Finder, which won the 2021 Arthur Ellis Award for Crime Fiction. With his brother, Ian, he is the author of the mega-bestseller How to Be a Canadian. He lives in Calgary.