Archives de catégorie : Literary

HOT SPRINGS DRIVE de Lindsay Hunter

An urgent, vicious blade of a novel about a shocking betrayal and its aftermath, HOT SPRINGS DRIVE asks just how far you’ll go to have everything you want.

HOT SPRINGS DRIVE
by Lindsay Hunter
‎ Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic, November 2023

Jackie Stinson’s best friend is dead, and everyone knows who killed her.

Jackie wants to be many things, but a martyr has never been one of them. She is an ex-emotional eater and mother of four, who has finally lost the weight she long yearned to be free of. In her new, sharp-edged body, she goes by Jacqueline. But leaving her old self behind proves harder than she ever imagined. And while she believes she should be happier, misery still chases her, and motherhood threatens to subsume what little is left of her.

Her only salve is her best friend Theresa, whose seemingly perfect life she desperately covets. Since they met in the maternity ward 15 years earlier, the two have survived the trials of motherhood side by side—Theresa with her quiet, cherubic daughter, and Jacqueline with her rambunctious, unruly boys. Their bond is tight, but it is not enough to keep Jacqueline, finally moving through the world in the body she has always wanted, from stealing a bit of Theresa’s perfect life.

HOT SPRINGS DRIVE is a dark, heart-pounding exploration of one woman’s deepest desires, and how the consequences of betrayal can ripple outward beyond the initial strike point. In her third, fiercest, and now hotly anticipated novel, acclaimed literary voice Lindsay Hunter deftly peels back the fragile veneer of two suburban families and the secrets roiling between them.

Lindsay Hunter is the author of two story collections and two novels. Her second collection, Don’t Kiss Me, was named one of Amazon’s 10 Best Books of the Year: Short Stories. Her latest novel, Eat Only When You’re Hungry, was a finalist for the 2017 Chicago Review of Books Fiction Award and a 2017 NPR Great Read. She lives in Chicago.

MIRAGE de David Ralph Viviers

A literary mystery that stretches back to Victorian times and set on the arid plains of South Africa’s Karoo by David Ralph Viviers.

MIRAGE
by David Ralph Viviers
Penguin Random House South Africa, February 2023
(via The Lennon-Ritchie Agency)

A century-old trunk has been dug up near the railway village of Sterfontein. Inside is the lost journal of Victorian author ElizabethTenant – and what appear to be the remains of a child. Michael, a university student recovering from a broken heart, is intriguedby what the journal describes: a scarlet curtain billowing above the desert, covering the entrance to another world. But thingsbecome even stranger when a line in the journal seems to be connected to Michael and his cosmologist mother, written ahundred years before their time. Without much to go on, Michael travels to the old Karoo hotel where Elizabeth wrote her novelMIRAGE. Amid talk of omens in the sky, ancient prophecies and the end of the world, he tries to decipher the journal’s secrets. Asone mystery leads to the next, constellation-like patterns between his own life and Elizabeth’s appear, helped along by Renata, aself-proclaimed medium, and Oom Sarel, the local museum curator. But as time starts to dissolve in the mirages of the Karoo, itbecomes more and more difficult to know what is real and what is not. And why can’t he shake the feeling that he’s been to thevillage before?

David Ralph Viviers is a Cape Town-based writer and film and theatre actor. He holds a BA in Theatre and Performance, as well as a master’s degree in Creative Writing, both with distinction, from the University of Cape Town. In 2016, he was the recipient of the Brett Goldin Bursary award, which allowed him to study with the Royal Shakespeare Company for a month in Stratford-upon-Avon. For his work in both English and Afrikaans theatre, he won a Fleur du Cap Award in 2020 and has received several Kanna and Fiësta nominations. His film/TV work includes BINNELANDERS, TALI’S BABYDIARY, KANARIE, NO HIDING HERE, HOME AFFAIRS 1 & 2, RAGE and BLACK SAILS. MIRAGE is his debut novel.

THORN TREE de Max Ludington

The dark side of the 1960s returns to haunt a contemporary Los Angeles family in this new novel from a critically acclaimed author. Prefect for readers of Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone and A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.

THORN TREE
by Max Ludington
St. Martin’s Press, April 2024

From the acclaimed author of Tiger in a Trance (Doubleday, 2003) comes a suspenseful and beautifully wrought novel about the aftershocks of the late 1960s and the relationship between trauma and the creative impulse. Now in his seventies, Daniel lives in quiet anonymity in a converted guest cottage in the Hollywood Hills. A legendary artist, he’s known for one seminal work—Thorn Tree—a hulking, welded, scrap metal sculpture that he built in the Mojave desert in the 1970s. The work emerged from tragedy, but building it kept Daniel alive and catapulted him to brief, reluctant fame in the art world.
Daniel is landlord and neighbor to Celia, a charismatic but fragile actress living in the main house on his property. She too experienced youthful fame, hers in a popular television series, but saw her life nearly collapse after a series of bad decisions. Now, a new movie with a notorious director might re-ignite her career. A single mother, Celia leaves her young son, Dean, for weeks at a time with her father, Jack, who stays at her house while she’s on location. Jack and Daniel strike up a tentative friendship as Dean takes to visiting Daniel’s cottage—but something about Jack seems off. Discomfiting, strangely intimate, with flashes of anger balanced by an almost philosophical bent, Jack is not the harmless grandparent he pretends to be.
Weaving the idealism and the darkness of the late 1960s, the glossy surfaces of Los Angeles celebrity today, and thrumming with the sound of the Grateful Dead, the mania of Charles Manson and other cults, and the secrets that both Jack and Daniel have harbored for fifty years, THORN TREE is an utterly-compelling novel.

Max Ludington’s first novel, Tiger in a Trance was a New York Times Notable Book. He received his M.F.A. from Columbia University and now lives in New York. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Tin House, Meridian, Nerve, and On the Rocks: The KGB Bar Fiction Anthology.

ELAINE de Will Self

From the Booker-shortlisted author of Umbrella, a brilliant portrait of motherhood, sublimated desire, and the reverberations of the Cold War in a novel that investigates and reimagines the life of the author’s mother.

ELAINE
by Will Self
Grove Press, September 2024

Will Self is one of the most inimitable contemporary writers in the English language, dubbed “the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation” (Guardian). His work has been shortlisted for awards including the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award for Novel of the Year, and selected for best of the year lists, including those of the Times, Guardian, Independent and Financial Times. He also earns rapturous reviews, with his last novel, Phone, hailed as “one of the most significant literary works of our century” (New Statesman). Following a blistering personal account of addiction in his memoir Will, Self turns his forensic eye to the life of his own equally troubled mother, Elaine, in this brilliantly conceived new novel.

Standing by the mailbox outside 1100 Hemlock Street in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her child and husband, an Ivy League academic and former Communist Party member, inside her house and wonders: is this . . . it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that ends her marriage and upends her life.

Based on the intimate diaries Self’s mother kept for over forty years, ELAINE is a writer’s attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm of a parent’s interior life prior to his own existence. Perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction, ELAINE shows Will Self working in an exciting new dimension, utilizing his stylistic talents to tremendous effect.

Will Self is the author of many novels and books of nonfiction, including Great Apes; How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year; The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction; Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Shark; Phone; the memoir Will; and the essay collection Why Read. He lives in South London.

THE STORYTELLER de Faiqa Mansab

Healing generational trauma through storytelling and solving the mystery of three murders.

THE STORYTELLER
by Faiqa Mansab
Neem Tree Press, June 2024
(via Randle Editorial & Literary Consultancy)

Layla, a scholar of stories, lives a quiet, predictable life until one day she finds a dead woman in her library.

Mira is a renowned storyteller. When a corpse turns up in a red cloak with a note to her from the murderer, she must join forces with Layla and enter the realm of Story for answers in a bid to save herself and her daughter.

This novel is immersed in Sufi literature, Sufi storytelling techniques and fairy tales, but at its heart it is a murder mystery. The story is set in the U.S. and is also about the wounded relationship of a mother and daughter, how they heal their relationship while they solve the murders with the help of fairy tales retold, and old secret Sufi stories. It is Elif Shafak’s Forty Rules of Love meets Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.

THE STORYTELLER explores the healing of wounded motherdaughter relationships through the magic of Sufi storytelling.

Faiqa Mansab is a Pakistani writer. She holds an Mphil in English Literature, an MFA in creative writing with a high distinction from Kingston University London and an MA in Gender and Cultural Studies from Birkbeck University London. She has written and continues to write for numerous publications both local and international. Her debut novel This House of Clay and Water (2017) was longlisted for Getz Pharma Fiction Prize and the German Consulate Peace Prize at the Karachi Literature Festival 2018. Faiqa lives in Lahore with her family. Faiqa is agented by Annette Crossland at A for Authors LitAg.