‘Hauntingly creepy’ – ERIN KELLY
‘A unique jewel of a book’ – LIZZY BARBER
‘A heartfelt and chilling gothic tragedy’ – CHRIS WHITAKER

People come to visit my home and I love to show them around. It’s not the original house of course. That was destroyed the day my entire family died. But I don’t think their ghosts know the difference.

Pera Sinclair was nine the day the pilot intentionally crashed his plane into her family’s grand home, killing everyone inside. She was the girl who survived the tragedy, a sympathetic oddity, growing stranger by the day. Over the decades she rebuilt the huge and rambling building on the original site, recreating what she had lost, each room telling a piece of the story of her life and that of the many people who died there, both before and after the disaster. Her sister, murdered a hundred miles away. The soldier, broken by war. Death follows Pera, and she welcomes it in as an old friend. And while she doesn’t believe in ghosts, she’s not above telling a ghost story or two to those who come to visit Sinclair House.

As Pera shows a young family around her home on the last haunted house tour of the season, an unexpected group of men arrive. One she recognises, but the others are strangers. But she knows their type all too well. Dangerous men, who will hurt the family without a second thought, and who will keep an old woman alive only so long as she is useful. But as she begins to show them around her home and reveal its secrets, the dangerous men will learn that she is far from helpless. After all, death seems to follow her wherever she goes…

Sinister and lyrical, The Underhistory is a haunting tale of loss, self-preservation and the darkness beneath.

Available from: Waterstones | Bookshop.org | Amazon

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1
SINCLAIR HOUSE, 1993

Looking back, Pera figured out that at the very moment Ike shot his first victim in the jailbreak, she was cleaning up the blood spilled by a visitor who fainted after seeing the rat king. It wasn’t a big spill, but she knew from past experience that even a small amount of blood would smell bad in a couple of days. It was always the Underhistory, the cellar, that got them. Sometimes it was fright, or tiredness, or the closeness of the air. But if someone was going to collapse, that’s where they’d do it.

It was the second-to-last Sinclair House tour of the season, and admittedly her heart wasn’t in it. Usually she’d pack up and leave after the last tour, to be away during flood season. But she was tired. This year, she would stay at home.

After that tour, she had gone into town for the last time, pulling into a parking spot right in front of the hair salon and giving herself a cheer. You never wanted to be late for an appointment with Marcia.

Pera had walked through the door with minutes to spare. Marcia glanced up and rolled her eyes.

‘How are you, Marcia?’

‘Running behind, as usual. Everybody’s always late.’ Marcia had ideas about herself and cutting hair in this small country town weren’t among them. Pera cursed Claudia for being away; usually a haircut meant a house call and an excuse for gossip and champagne. Pera wasn’t keen on Marcia’s cuts but she had been desperate; she looked like an old hag. And Marcia had a loser for a husband, so Pera tried to be kind to her. ‘So, what miracle do you want me to perform today?’ Marcia said.

What Pera had seen in the mirror was not who she was. At heart, she was thirty-three. She dressed young but the wrinkles? There was little she could do about them apart from a face-lift and she didn’t want that stretched leather look.

She had picked out a new lipstick from Marcia’s selection. ‘Bit bright for your age, isn’t it?’ Marcia had said, and Pera had said, ‘You know how much I like colour!’ primping at her hair. She wasn’t bothered by these slights; they said more about Marcia than they did about her. Pera never left the house underdressed. She had a lovely silk scarf she bought in Dublin, shoes from Italy and her Chanel suits she would not be without.

The previous customer paid up, grumbling, and Pera had waited until Marcia gestured her into the chair, where she poked Pera’s hair. ‘Had a go at this yourself, did you?’ She had started combing Pera’s hair, tugging at knots Pera didn’t think were really there.

‘You’re hurting me,’ she had said. ‘Marcia? Can you be a bit more gentle?’

‘Jesus Fucking Christ,’ Marcia had said.

‘Is everything all right, Marcia?’

The phone had rung and Marcia had answered it, launching into a tirade. Pera had decided she’d rather wear her hair in a bun until Claudia came back than let this woman cut it in this state of mind, so she had removed the apron and sidled out of the shop without Marcia even noticing. She had too much to do to waste her time sitting there.

There were conversations every step as she did her shopping, with the wonderful Gwennie – seventy-five, bright and lively, she still cleaned her own gutters – and with Mrs Robertson, dressed as ever as if she were going to the opera; tailored jacket, silver and pearl brooch, diamond-studded watch. She carried a mahogany walking stick but mostly used it to wave at people.

Pera liked her small town; here, people knew her. Elsewhere she was old and could wait and wait and not be noticed in a shop. She was invisible. Here, she was still Pera from Sinclair House, the sole survivor, their famous girl.

‘I thought you were off to Melbourne?’ Mrs Robertson had asked. ‘Your annual?’

‘New Zealand, actually. Stocking up on non-perishables so I have things waiting for me when I get back.’

‘I hope you’ve let the district nurse know. You know how awful she gets when she doesn’t!’ Mrs Robertson had eyed the milk and cheese but had said nothing. ‘You enjoy yourself,’ she said, patting Pera’s arm. ‘Did you hear? Mrs Bee’s Wayne is getting out of jail. She’s had a phone call from him. She’s that pleased!’

‘I hadn’t heard,’ Pera had said. She had written to Mrs Bee, telling her the lie about New Zealand, feeling bad about it but knowing it was all part of the deception.

‘Didn’t our Marcia go out with him for a while? Lucky escape, that one! For him, I mean!’ The two women had chuckled.

‘But between you and me, I think Mrs Bee is confused. They’re not letting that boy out. They locked him up and threw away the key for what he did.’

On the way out with her shopping bags Pera tripped and fell, cutting her knees badly on the corner of the kerb and twisting her ankle as well. Everybody fussed, wanting to call an ambulance. ‘No, no, I have a tour coming,’ she said. She did have one last group.

Later, when Pera had arrived home, the man from the stables had come to take her horses away. ‘Off for a month, are you? Where is it you’re going?’

‘New Zealand! Lucky old me. I’ll send you a postcard,’ Pera had said. The lie had come smoothly off her tongue, after weeks of convincing people she was leaving town. ‘One more tour and I’ll be off to the land of the long white cloud.’ She travelled most years. She’d planned to go back to Greece, but that seemed exhausting, so she’d booked New Zealand, but even that felt too much. Instead she had decided to stock up on food, barricade herself in and sleep, read, rest.

‘I’ll take good care of these beauties,’ the man had said, stroking the mane of one of her horses.

‘You always do,’ Pera had said. She knew she should just let him keep them for good, but they provided her comfort. If she heard a whicker or neigh, she could be sure it was a real horse out there, not a ghost.

***

The blood in the cellar was cleaned away and the preparations for the last tour of the season were nearly done. On the third floor, Pera shifted the dusty mannequin dressed in a bloodied butcher’s apron to the side, pushed a panel and opened the concealed door to her private stairway.

She’d added the secret door because people had no boundaries. No matter how many ‘Private: Do Not Enter’ signs she put up, people stamped up the stairs looking for her, wanting things, asking questions. She loved her apartment; so bright and sunny, so different from the rest of the house, which was full of history and stories. Up here there was simply the present and that was refreshing. It was a perfect space for a single person, making a small fourth floor. She had two bedrooms and too many closets, full of books, jewellery, memorabilia and clothing.

She spent a moment gazing out the window at the astonishing lawn full of flowers, all of them grown from the tributes she’d laid out there decades ago. She called Mrs Bee in Queensland, worried about the gossip she’d heard about Wayne getting out of jail – he always caused her grief – but there was no answer. Pera left a message and promised herself to call back in the evening.

Then she showered, spending too long but unwilling to leave the hot, comforting pressure of the water. She sang in the shower
at the top of her voice, Puccini’s ‘O mio babbino caro’. It always calmed her.

That calm left when she saw herself in the mirror. She again cursed the fact that Claudia, dear friend and hairdresser who would usually come to her to do her hair, was away, and that bloody Marcia in town, the cow, had been so bad-tempered she hadn’t had the haircut and dye-job she desperately needed. She washed her hair, then brushed it back. She’d tie it in a bun and play the little old lady for this tour group.

They never minded that. Her ankle was sore from her fall, so she took a cane out of the umbrella stand. Even better.

When she had a tour going through, she could mark off hours reliably. If not, only the clocks marked time and they were not trustworthy.

Just this last tour, then she could rest.

‘Help Wanted is like a great nineteenth-century novel about now, at once an effervescent workplace comedy and an exploration of the psychic toll exacted by the labour market’ Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot

‘An immersive, deeply affecting human drama’ Bookseller, March 2024 Book of the Month

‘Poignant, funny, stealthily ambitious’ The New York Times

At a superstore in a small town in upstate New York, the members of Team Movement clock in every day at 3.55 am. Under the red-eyed scrutiny of their self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty delivery trucks of mountains of merchandise, stock the shelves and stagger home (or to another poorly paid day job) before the customers arrive.

When Big Will the store manager announces he’s leaving, everything changes. The eclectic team members now see a way to have their awful line manager promoted up and away from them, and to dream of a promotion of their own. Together they set an extravagant plan in motion.

Available from: Waterstones | Bookshop.org | Amazon

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1

 

THE FIRST HINT something was up was so subtle that it barely registered. Just before the start of Monday’s 4 a.m. shift, the members of Movement were in the employee area at the front of the store, waiting
to clock in. Everyone was there—everyone, that is, except Meredith, the person at the center of the plot that was soon to take shape, its reason for being.

Nicole turned to Little Will, Movement’s group manager. “She’s still coming back today?” Nicole asked. “She hasn’t been, like, fired?”

At twenty-three, Nicole was the youngest person in Movement.

“Nope,” answered Little Will. “She texted me last night.”

As if Nicole had demanded proof, he fished his phone from his pocket, tapped its screen several times, and passed the device to her. I’ ll be a little late tomorrow, read the message from “Meredith, boss.” I need
a little rest after vacay, you know how it is! The words were followed by two emojis: a beach ball and a glass of wine.

Nicole rolled her eyes. She was about to hand back Little Will’s phone when a new text bubble appeared on the screen. She couldn’t help but read it. Hey man, I’ve got some news. Could be big for Movement.
Coming in now, will tell you & M after the unload. The text was from Big Will, the store manager.

“Huh,” Nicole said. She gave the phone back to Little Will, then watched him as he read the text.

He was six foot one. He was only called Little Will to distinguish him from Big Will. Big Will was five eleven, but it was his grinning face, captured by a Polaroid, that sat at the top of the org chart taped
to the wall of the break room at Town Square Store #1512 in Potterstown, NY. From Big Will’s photo, seven spokes pointed diagonally down to the next layer of management, the store’s executive managers. One of these was Meredith. Her photo, taken at a flattering three-quarter angle, showed her smiling coyly. Two months earlier, it had been pulled from the slot that said “Executive Manager for Sales—Hardlines” and reglued above the words “Executive Manager for Logistics (a.k.a. Movement).” A lone vertical line led down from Meredith’s picture to Little Will’s. His appeared to have been taken under duress. It had a startled mug-shot quality. As if to underline a point about his status, Little Will’s title—group manager—wasn’t capitalized. The rank-and- file members of Movement weren’t pictured at all.

“Maybe Meredith really is getting fired?” Nicole said when Little Will looked up from his phone. She grinned hopefully.

She was pretty, in a fresh-faced, apple-cheeked, straight-from-the-farm way, the kind of dimpled white girl you could picture in ye olden days, in a gingham dress and braids as she milked a cow. To tamp down
such associations, she slouched, wore baggy T-shirts and boxy pants that sat low on her hips, smoked constantly, avoided both the sun and foods that weren’t heavily processed and/or white in color, and generally cultivated an air of boredom and free-floating hostility.

Little Will frowned. As a manager (albeit a low-level one), he tried to adhere to certain standards. “Let’s not jump ahead of ourselves,” he said.

Nicole looked at him with something close to pity. It wasn’t only because he was too nice to talk shit even about Meredith. He’d missed multiple buttons on his shirt—a limp, faded, pill-covered
flannel he kept balled up on the passenger seat of his car when he wasn’t working. Swatches of white undershirt were visible between buttonholes. Little Will would have been ridiculous if he weren’t so good-looking.

The digits on the two identical time clocks hanging on the opposite wall changed synchronously from 3:54 to 3:55. The text slipped from Nicole’s mind as she joined the others.

After clocking in, a few people went straight to the sales floor. The rest headed to the warehouse. Movement was responsible for unloading the trucks that came from Town Square’s corporate distribution center in western Pennsylvania and for getting the merchandise onto the store’s shelves.

Nicole, who was in the warehouse group, walked with the others through the quiet store to Aisle E26 (lightbulbs), all the way in the back. At the end of the aisle, they passed through a set of double doors, marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.

The warehouse was even more dungeon-like than usual. With sunrise still a ways off, its small, dirty skylights were useless. The half dozen or so bare bulbs that hung from the high ceiling only dented the gloom. The air was thick and warm. There was never any AC back here, but with the store closed to customers, the HVAC system was on eco mode: no occasional blasts of cooled air wafted in from the sales floor. The truck was parked ass-out in the first of the warehouse’s three loading docks. Every few seconds, high-pitched squeals tore through the dark space. The line—a long metal track that ferried merchandise through the warehouse—needed oiling.

Milo and Diego had arrived before the others, to set up. Milo was already in position, standing just inside the truck, and was raring
to go—rotating his arms in their shoulder sockets, like a pitcher warming up.

Milo was the thrower. His job was to transfer boxes from the truck onto the line, then push them to the next person, who scanned them. At store #1512, this was Nicole. If her scanner said a box held backstock, she drew a slash on its label with a Sharpie before pushing the box down the line. Downstream from her, Travis, Raymond, Diego, Val, and the old guys were spread out along the line. Each one was responsible for picking certain categories of boxes off the line and putting them onto pallets waiting by their feet. Boxes that weren’t theirs, they pushed to the next person, until the truck was empty.

Without waiting for the old guys to get to their posts at the back of the line, Milo began pushing boxes down the track.

Nicole’s scanner intoned dully—beep, beep, beeeeep—as it hovered over a microwave, a box of DVDs, a bundle of six swim noodles tied together with twine, which for some reason—who knew or cared—elicited a longer and higher-pitched squawk. Nicole fell into a steady, almost somnambulant rhythm as she scanned and pushed, scanned and pushed. There came a cordless vacuum cleaner, an infant car seat, several packages of paper towels fused together with shrink-wrap, a box containing tubs of protein powder, an office chair, a dollhouse, kitty litter, curtain rods, an air conditioner, a box of mixed HBA (health and beauty aids), a flat-screen TV, baby wipes, a box of individually packaged, microwavable bowls of organic mac ’n’ cheese, two Blu-ray players, a convection oven, four Android cell phones, a crate of jarred pasta sauce, a box of DVDs, a stack of Monopoly sets wrapped in cellophane, a white-noise machine, a mixed box of Chemical (cleaning supplies), a bundle of shrink-wrapped lampshades, more kitty litter, several cases of flavored seltzer water in 12-ounce aluminum cans, tiny cans of gourmet dog food, deodorant, double-A batteries, even more kitty litter—for decades, Potterstown had been hemorrhaging people, but judging by the fecal evidence, its cats were flourishing—dish soap, soap dishes, a drip coffeemaker, a Keurig coffeemaker, pots for planting, pots for cooking, rubber mats to put in the footwell of a car, crayons, laundry baskets, bookshelves, a half dozen bound American flags, shampoo, nail polish, wood polish, shoe polish.

When a pallet filled with boxes, Little Will used a jack to whisk it from its spot. Before taking it out to the sales floor to be unpacked—or “broken out,” as they called it—he swapped an empty pallet in its place so the movement of the line wouldn’t be interrupted, even for a moment. Corporate insisted the unload take no more than an hour. If they took even a minute longer, Meredith, as executive manager, had to submit a “failure report,” as she called it. Having to do this guaranteed she’d be on the warpath for the rest of the morning. One time, after it happened, she’d sent Raymond home early, on the grounds—dubious, in Little Will’s judgment—that Raymond was still drunk from the night before. (He’d just smelled of booze.) More recently, she’d gone off on Nicole, chewing her out and threatening to write her up for no reason at all.

Before taking a pallet of HBA to Joyce on the sales floor, Little Will glanced at his wrist. It was bare. He remembered that his watch battery had died a few days ago. He pulled his phone from his pocket: 4:09. Shit.

Although corporate permitted them to clock in five minutes earlier, Movement’s shift officially started at four. They had to finish the unload by five.

Little Will rubbed his cheek. It was already stubbly. His shift began at three, an hour earlier than the others’, and lasted eight hours and forty-five minutes. Then he went to his second job, landscaping. He showered and shaved at night, before going to bed.

“Jesus Christ!”

Back in the warehouse, Val’s voice rose above the screech and clang of the line. Little Will turned to her. So did everyone else. With one hand, she held a large bag of kitty litter above her head, like the Statue of Liberty wielding her torch.

“This is soaked!” Val shouted, giving the kitty litter a little shake as the line came to a slow, whining stop. “C’mon, mofos! What’s the use of kitty litter if it’s wet?” With her free hand, she tapped the side of her head. “Think about it.”

But she was grinning. There were few things Val liked more than an opportunity to display her competence.

“Drama queen,” Milo muttered from the truck. Only Nicole heard. She didn’t respond. Nicole thought the idea of Milo calling anyone, even Val, dramatic was laughable. After three years of working next to Milo on the line, Nicole’s precise level of irritation with him ebbed and flowed, but it rarely dipped below a six on a one-to-ten scale.

Val tossed the kitty litter into the Damaged pile (which, to Milo’s point, she could have done immediately, without stopping the line). Boxes started to move again.

Love is in the air, and what better way to celebrate the season of romance than with captivating stories that warm the heart (more or less)?

This Valentine’s Day, we have handpicked for you a trio of literary gems that will make you want to swap roses for books… From the elegance of Mrs Gulliver to the raw honesty of Is This Love? and the sheer beauty of June Jordan’s verse in Haruko/Love Poems, we promise that these books will make your Valentine’s Day unforgettable!

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Mrs Gulliver

Available from Waterstones | Amazon | Bookshop.org

‘Irresistible – a funny, sexy romp that’s also smart, even wise’ Kirkus starred review

‘ Pure elegance, subtlety and wit. A triumph of a novel’ – Francesca Segal, author of Mother Ship

It is 1954, and prostitution is legal in the tropical haven that is Verona Island. Here, among gangsters and corrupt lawmen, Lila Gulliver runs a brothel that promises her exclusive clientele privacy and discretion. When nineteen-year-old Carità, beautiful and blind since birth, comes to her door seeking employment, Mrs Gulliver sees a business opportunity and takes a chance. Carità is mesmerising, sharp and a mystery to her employer, always holding herself at a distance.

One night, the son of a wealthy judge patronises Mrs Gulliver’s establishment, immediately falling madly in love with Carità. This is Ian Drohan – young, idealistic and cushioned by wealth and family connections. Mrs Gulliver mistrusts him, and worries for Carità’s future. Carità, on the other hand, is fearless, headstrong and a force of nature that Mrs Gulliver is always several steps behind.

A dazzling drama filled with sex, wry wit and literary references, Mrs Gulliver follows two women who have nothing to lose in their fight for agency on an island too ready to dismiss them.

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Is This Love?

Available from Waterstones | Amazon | Bookshop.org

‘This is a book about the untidy, complicated underbelly of love and love’s end.  Funny and true, wise and utterly authentic, you will recognise yourself over and over.  I loved it’ Kit de Waal

‘A deeply unsettling, but unputdownable account of a marriage unravelling. This book held me captivated with its wit, ambiguity and complexity’ Abi Morgan, creator of The Split

Did you mean to marry me?
Did you understand the vows that we took?

J’s wife has left, and J is trying to understand why. How could someone you loved so much, who claimed to love you once, just walk away? How could they send divorce papers accusing you of terrible things, when all you’ve ever done is tried to make them happy?

Narrated by J in the days, weeks and months after the marriage collapses, and interspersed with the departed wife’s diary entries, Is This Love? is an addictive, deeply unsettling, and provocative novel of deception and betrayal, and passion turned to pain. As the story unfolds, and each character’s version of events undermines the other, all our assumptions about victimhood, agency, love and control are challenged – for we never know J’s gender. If we did, would it change our minds about who was telling the truth?

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HARUKO/Love Poems

Available from Waterstones | Amazon | Bookshop.org

Selected by Seán Hewitt as a Granta Book of the Year

In trailblazing poet, essayist, teacher and activist June Jordan’s poems, love is a vision of revolutionary solidarity, crossing borders both emotional and literal with an outstretched hand. Haruko traces the faltering arc of a passionate love affair with another woman while Love Poems encompasses relationships with men and women, political resistance, the need for self-care in a demanding, uncaring world and apocalyptic visions of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum.

A contemporary of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde, June Jordan’s spectacular poetry remains profoundly politically potent, lyrically inventive and breathtakingly romantic. First published in 1994, Haruko/ Love Poems is a vitally important modern classic.

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What will you be reading this Valentine’s?

OUR YEAR IN BOOKS

 

It’s getting colder. Days are getting shorter. Fairy lights are twinkling from windows and balconies. It can only mean one thing… Time for some Christmas reading recommendations!

We present you with a selection of the glorious books we’re extremely proud to have published this year, and which we *bet​*​ any one of your loved ones would also love to read.

From moving literary debuts to alternate worlds, thought-provoking nonfiction and sweet stocking-fillers, Serpent’s Tail has you covered for a truly spectacular Christmas.

Happy reading!

Find us at @SerpentsTail and @ViperBooks

 

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STOCKING FILLERS

 

Cheri by Jo Ann Beard

A masterpiece of fiction and memory, Cheri is a heartbreaking but glorious celebration of all the moments of beauty and pain that make an individual life, right up until its very last moments.

Seven Cats I Have Loved by Anat Levit

Anat Levit never considered herself a cat lover, but when her life was thrown into upheaval, she found herself adopting one cat at the suggestion of her daughters, and then six more. She delves into the feline mind with gentleness and compassion, while also revealing a moving human story.

Love Me Tender by Constance Debre

‘Destined to become a classic of its kind’ Maggie Nelson
‘One of the most compulsive voices I’ve read in years’ Olivia Laing, Observer

A starkly beautiful account of impossible sacrifices asked from mothers, Love Me Tender is a bold novel of defiance, freedom and self-knowledge.

Alison by Lizzy Stewart

Alison is newly married, barely twenty and struggling to find her place in the world. A chance encounter with an older artist upturns her life and she forsakes convention and her working-class Dorset roots for the thrumming art scene of London in the late seventies.

“Every now and again a book comes along that is such a bright joy, so true, so beautiful and moving. Alison is one of those books. I loved it.” – Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist

 

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BEST BY FIRESIDE

 

Critical Hits edited by Carmen Maria Machado and J. Robert Lennon

Whether you’re an avid gamer, a Twitch subscriber, or just an incidental Subway Surfer, video games have changed the way you interact with the world and have been part of our lives for over fifty years. Critical Hits is a celebration of play and playfulness through sharp, impassioned and inquisitive essays.

Prostitute Laundry by Charlotte Shane

Prostitute Laundry is a taboo-breaking and radically honest account of love, friendship and sex work. This serial memoir follows Charlotte over the course of several years as she falls in and out of love, muses on the nature of sex work and the value of beauty, discovers hidden emotional complexities and contemplates leaving her profession.

Wish I Was Here by M. John Harrison

‘A masterpiece’ Helen Macdonald
‘It will surprise you, sometimes astound you, and leave you profoundly changed’ Jonathan Coe

One of our greatest and most original living writers sets out the perils of the writing life with joyful provocation. This is his first memoir, an ‘anti-memoir’, written with aphoristic daring and trademark originality and style.

 

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DECK THE SHELVES

 

Queen K by Sarah Thomas

Exquisitely written and deliciously unreliable, Queen K takes the reader to some of the most luxurious places in the world. But a dark refrain sounds from the very beginning of the story and grows towards its operatic finale: a novel about insatiable material desire can only ever be a tragedy…

A Flaw in the Design by Nathan Oates

A nephew. An uncle. A psychopath – but which of them is it?

Gil knows his nephew Matthew is dangerous, but to the women in the family he is charming, intelligent, wry. When he disdainfully joins Gil’s classes at the local university, Matthew makes his real intentions clear. Why is Gil the only one who can see this? Is he losing his mind?

Sanderson’s Isle by James Clarke

1969. Thomas Speake comes to London searching for his father and a place to belong, but instead joins the search for a stolen child through swinging London and the Lake District. There he finds Sanderson instead, a larger-than-life TV presenter, who hosts ‘midweek madness’ parties where the punch is spiked with acid…

 

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THE GHOST OF (POSSIBLE) FUTURES

 

Bliss & Blunder by Victoria Gosling

An inventive, magisterial reworking of the King Arthur legend for the 21st century and a heartrending novel of power, friendship and betrayal.

Jungle House by Julianne Pachico

‘Mother is not like other mothers. She gets angry when Lena draws her with a face. When Lena challenges her to portray herself, she paints a tiny yellow dot surrounded by swirling black. She is a bastion of light, she says, against an army of darkness.’

A suspenseful literary novel, with a premise perfect for fans of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, that asks: will humans and AIs form families, and what are the implications of this?

Girlfriend on Mars by Deborah Willis

A satirically funny, poignant and dark novel for fans of cool contemporary fiction. Follow weed-growing couple Kevin and Amber, as Amber is selected for a reality TV show to win a one-way ticket to Mars.

 

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THE BOOKS THAT STOLE CHRISTMAS

 

Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward

‘Writers are monsters. We eat everything we see…’

This book will be Wilder’s revenge on Sky, who betrayed his trust and died without ever telling him why. But as he writes, Wilder begins to find notes written in Sky’s signature green ink. Is Sky haunting him? And who is the dark-haired woman drowning in the cove, whom no one else can see?

Scarlet Town by Leonora Nattrass

1796. A rigged election. A town at war. A murderer at large…

Disgraced former Foreign Office clerk Laurence Jago and William Philpott have escaped America by the skin of their teeth. In this third instalment in the Laurence Jago series, they return to Laurence’s home town of Helston, Cornwall, where they find themselves in the middle of a tumultuous election that has the inhabitants of the town at one another’s throats.

The Christmas Appeal by Janice Hallett

One dead Santa. A town full of suspects. Will you discover the truth?

Christmas in Lower Lockwood, and the Fairway Players are busy rehearsing their festive pantomime. Sarah-Jane is fending off threats to her new position as Chair, the fibreglass beanstalk might be full of asbestos, and a someone is intent on ruining the panto even before the curtain goes up. Of course there’s also the matter of the dead body. Will the show go on?

 

‘A loot drop of brilliance’ – Naomi Alderman, author of The Power

Whether you’re an avid gamer, a Twitch subscriber, or just an incidental Subway Surfer, video games have changed the way you interact with the world, and have been part of our lives for over fifty years. Critical Hits is a celebration of play and playfulness, and the lasting impact of videogames.

Composed of sharp, impassioned, and inquisitive essays, this collection begins with an introduction by Carmen Maria Machado and presents video games through the eyes of eighteen writer-gamers as they straddle real and artificial worlds. In games, they find solace from illness and grief, test ideas about language, bodies, race, and technology, and see their experiences and identities reflected in-or complicated by-the interactive virtual realities they inhabit.

From a deep dive into “portal fantasy” games by Charlie Jane Anders and a comic by MariNaomi about her time as a video game producer, to the overlaps in gaming and poetry by Stephen Sexton, Critical Hits illuminates fragments of an industry that is wildly popular, grossly misunderstood, and absolutely spellbinding.

Featuring: Red Dead Redemption, Genshin Impact, Hollow Knight, Halo, Call of Duty 4, The Last of Us, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Fallout 76, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy VI, and many more!

Available from: Bookshop.org | Foyles | Forbidden Planet | Waterstones | Amazon

 

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CONTENTS

• Introduction
  Carmen Maria Machado

• I Struggled a Long Time with Surviving
  Elissa Washuta

• This Kind of Animal
  Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

• Thinking like the Knight
  Max Delsohn

• Mule Milk
  Keith S. Wilson

• Staying with the Trouble
  Octavia Bright

• Narnia Made of Pixels
  Charlie Jane Anders

• Cathartic Warfare
  Jamil Jan Kochai

• The Cocoon
  Ander Monson

• Video Game Boss
  MariNaomi

• In the Shadow of the Wolf
  Vanessa Villarreal

• Clash Rules Everything around Me
  Tony Tulathimutte

• The Great Indoorsmen
  Eleanor Henderson

• I Was a Teenage Transgender Supersoldier
  nat steele

• Ninjas and Foxes
  Alexander Chee

• No Traces
  Stephen Sexton

• Status Effect
  Larissa Pham

• Ruined Ground
  J. Robert Lennon

• We’re More Ghosts Than People
  Hanif Abdurraqib

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Have we made you curious?

Critical Hits will make an exclusive appearance at MCM London Comicon on 27-29 October at Forbidden Planet’s stall (N800) alongside our authors!

And if you absolutely cannot wait to dive in, Critical Hits will also be freely available to read on Netgalley during MCM weekend – but better request it fast, as there are only 50 copies up for grabs! Here is the link you will want to bookmark to get ahead of the queue:

Critical Hits on Netgalley

SERPENT’S TAIL
BLACK HISTORY MONTH SPOTLIGHT

A letter from our editors…

Serpent’s Tail is proud to be publishing three brilliant debuts by Black writers in 2023, with settings spanning from South London all the way to Amsterdam and America.

To start the year off, we present prize-winning Dutch star Simone Atangana Bekono, whose novel Confrontations follows a bookish and bullied sixteen-year-old girl in a unit for young offenders. Further into spring, Gianni Washington’s chilling short story collection Flowers from the Void showcases a new and fearsome vision for American gothic fiction. And in the summer, Orlaine McDonald’s No Small Thing vibrantly depicts the joy and pain of Black and working-class life in urban Britain.

With sharp prose and dynamic characters, each of these debuts tell distinctive stories that will entertain you, move you and make you think.

Follow us on X @SerpentsTail | Instagram @serpentstail

 

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Confrontations
by Simone Atangana Bekono
11 January 2024

Salomé was bullied for years and no one did a single thing to help her. One day she finally snapped. Now at just sixteen years old, she’s being held in a secure unit for young offenders. But as time passes, she finds new strength to delve into the reasons for her rage and arrive at her own understanding of punishment, penitence and the paradoxical demands made on her existence as a Black woman.

 

 

 

Leonora Craig-Cohen, Commissioning Editor, on Confrontations

‘In this layered, literary page-turner, the young protagonist upends common preconceptions of justice to tell her own story. Salomé’s voice is instantly engaging and the reasons for her rage difficult to turn away from.’

 

Flowers from the Void
by Gianni Washington
2 May 2024

Hauntingly macabre and piercingly insightful about loss and loneliness, these gothic short stories lead us into a labyrinth of other possible worlds, each one darker than the last and yet all fearfully close to our own. Living dolls serve as imperfect replacements for the deceased, a girl without a shadow finds her soulmate and spurned lovers’ bodies begin falling to pieces. In this scintillating debut collection Gianni Washington explores the limit of intimacy and empathy with the vivid intensity of your worst nightmare.

 

 

 

Leonora Craig-Cohen, Commissioning Editor, on Flowers from the Void

‘Gianni Washington skilfully blends elements of gothic horror, science fiction and folklore in this deliciously grotesque collection. Read with all your lights on, and sleep with one eye open!’

 

No Small Thing
by Orlaine McDonald
4 July 2024

Three women. For a year they live in the flat below Earl’s on Blossom View Estate. Then there are two. Spanning a year, this is a novel of hope, desire and loss which explores the damage we do to the people we claim to love the most. Told with grace and compelling clarity, No Small Thing reveals tender truths about motherhood, the intersection of class and race and the legacies of the trauma we inherit.

‘Being a mother is no small thing, and whether or not you agree with mothers Livia and Mickey, you will love them for who they are, as well as who they are trying to be. And of course, there is Summer. Eleven years old and confused, desperate to be seen, and dangerously unaware of her own vulnerability.’

 

Luke Brown, Publishing Director, on No Small Thing

‘I love the way Orlaine McDonald presents life on a London council estate, with all its ups and down, rather than as a symbol for social depravation. It’s a subtle look at class and race, and how they affect the generations of characters who live there. And it’s a novel that crackles with female desire, with women seeking freedom and transcendence through risky relationships with men. I really hope you’ll like it.’

 

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Explore our backlist…

SERPENT’S TAIL AUTUMN READING GUIDE

Sweater weather is here…

Which means it’s time to start squirreling away books in preparation for cosy nights curled up reading with a nice cuppa. Lucky for you, we have prepared a wonderful selection of titles to treat yourself with, from stirring novellas to genre-bending fiction!

Which stories will you be falling into this autumn? Let us know by tweeting us @SerpentsTail.

 

SWEATER WEATHER

Reads that will make you want to stay inside

 

Critical Hits eds. by Carmen Maria Machado and J. Robert Lennon

Whether you’re an avid gamer, a Twitch subscriber, or just an incidental Subway Surfer, video games have changed the way you interact with the world and have been part of our lives for over fifty years. Critical Hits is a celebration of play and playfulness through sharp, impassioned and inquisitive essays.

Alison by Lizzy Stewart

Alison is newly married, barely twenty and struggling to find her place in the world. A chance encounter with an older artist upturns her life and she forsakes her roots for the thrumming art scene of London in the late seventies.

As the thrill of bohemian romance leads inevitably to disappointment, Alison begins to find her own path – through art, friendship and love.

The Collected Works by Jo Ann Beard

‘The stories are essays, the essays are stories. Even when they are not literally true, they contain the kind of truth that great fiction thrives on’ The Times

‘Literature’s best kept secret’ Independent

Jo Ann Beard, one of the most influential writers in America, illuminates the complexities of the human condition in this career-spanning collection of her best work.

 

 

TURNING OVER A NEW LEAF

Genre-bending and escapist fiction for daydreaming

 

Sanderson’s Isle by James Clarke

1969. Thomas Speake comes to London searching for his father and a place to belong, but instead joins the search for a stolen child through swinging London and the Lake District. There he finds Sanderson instead, a larger-than-life TV presenter who hosts ‘midweek madness’ parties where the punch is spiked with acid…

Girlfriend on Mars by Deborah Willis

A satirically funny, poignant and dark novel for fans of cool contemporary fiction. Follow weed-growing couple Kevin and Amber as Amber is selected for a reality TV to win a one-way ticket to Mars.

Jungle House by Julianne Pachico

‘Mother is not like other mothers. She gets angry when Lena draws her with a face. When Lena challenges her to portray herself, she paints a tiny yellow dot surrounded by swirling black. She is a bastion of light, she says, against an army of darkness.’

A suspenseful literary novel with a premise perfect for fans of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro that asks: will humans and AIs form families, and what are the implications of this?

 

 

TRICK-OR-TREAT

Reads with a touch of magic for spooky season

 

The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter by Soraya Palmer

Life at home has become unbearable for Zora and Sasha. But they can’t hide forever. The Anansi stories stories that captivated them as children begin to creep into the present, revealing truths about the Porter family’s past they must all face up to…

This is an extraordinary debut novel that asks – what happens when our stories are erased? Do we disappear? Or do we come back haunting?

Verge by Nadia Attia

Two strangers bound by fate.
A deadly curse.
An epic road trip across a (dis)United Kingdom.

Exploring belief, loyalty and legacies beyond our control, this thrilling debut is as magnetic and unpredictable as the curse Rowena is racing to escape.

The Green Man of Eshwood Hall by Jacob Kerr

A family story rooted in folk tale, The Green Man of Eshwood Hall shows us the power that the wild still holds on our imagination and the shocking nightmares to which it can give rise.

 

 

SHORTER DAYS, SHORTER BOOKS

Short but sweet reads

Seven Cats I Have Loved by Anat Levit

Anat never considered herself a cat lover, but when her life was thrown into upheaval, she found herself adopting one cat at the suggestion of her daughters, and then six more. She delves into the feline mind with gentleness and compassion, while also revealing a moving human story.

Love Me Tender by Constance Debré

‘Destined to become a classic of its kind’ Maggie Nelson

‘One of the most compulsive voices I’ve read in years’ Olivia Laing, Observer

A starkly beautiful account of impossible sacrifices asked from mothers, Love Me Tender is a bold novel of defiance, freedom and self-knowledge.

Cheri by Jo Ann Beard

A masterpiece of fiction and memory, Cheri is a heart-breaking but glorious celebration of all the moments of beauty and pain that make an individual life, right up until its very last moments.

Sun’s out, books out!

The sun is finally out, which means it’s time to start counting down the days until summer vacation. From beloved stories with a fresh paperback look, to sizzling new titles and thought-provoking memoirs, we at Serpent’s Tail have cooked up a summer reading guide that is truly… out of this world.

Which books will you be diving into this summer? Let us know by tweeting us @SerpentsTail.

 

FOUR FRESH PAPERBACKS

Is This Love? by C.E. Riley

A searing literary debut with the compulsive qualities of a thriller… J’s wife has left, and J is trying to understand why. Narrated by J in the days, weeks and months after the marriage collapses, Is This Love? is an addictive, deeply unsettling, and provocative novel of deception and betrayal, and passion turned to pain.

We Move by Gurnaik Johal

Mapping an area of West London, these stories chart a wider narrative about the movement of multiple generations of immigrants. In acts of startling imagination, Gurnaik Johal’s debut brings together the past and the present, the local and the global, to show the surprising ways we come together.

The Cherry Robbers by Sarai Walker

First they get married, then they get buried. The Cherry Robbers is a wonderfully atmospheric, propulsive novel about sisterhood, mortality and forging one’s own path.

Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors by Aravind Jayan

A scandalous video.
A humiliated family.
And a brother stuck in the middle.

Full of bittersweet comedy, and insight into contemporary Indian society and an online generation, this is a story about now with the feel of a classic.

THREE HOT NEW TITLES

The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter by Soraya Palmer

Life at home has become unbearable for Zora and Sasha. But they can’t hide forever. The Anansi Stories that captivated them as children begin to creep into the present, revealing truths about the Porter family’s past they must all face up to…

This is an extraordinary debut novel that asks – what happens when our stories are erased? Do we disappear? Or do we come back haunting?

The Incredible Events in Women’s Cell Number 3 by Kira Yarmysh

*WINNER OF THE ENGLISH PEN AWARD*

When Anya is arrested at a Moscow anti-corruption rally, she is given a sentence at a detention centre. But her cellmates are not thieves, crooks and murderers…

A brilliant exploration of what it means to be marginalized in an increasingly intolerant Russia in particular, this explosive debut introduces one of the most urgent and gripping new voices in international literature.

HARUKO/Love Poems by June Jordan

Searingly beautiful poems about compassion, resistance and desire by an iconic Black American activist and writer. June Jordan’s spectacular poetry remains profoundly politically potent, lyrically inventive and breathtakingly romantic. First published in 1994, it is a vitally important modern classic.

TWO INCREDIBLE MEMOIRS

Wish I Was Here by M. John Harrison

‘Wish I Was Here is a masterpiece’ Helen Macdonald
‘It will surprise you, sometimes astound you, and leave you profoundly changed’ Jonathan Coe

One of our greatest and most original living writers sets out the perils of the writing life with joyful provocation. This is his first memoir, an ‘anti-memoir’, written with aphoristic daring and trademark originality and style.

Prostitute Laundry by Charlotte Shane

Prostitute Laundry is a taboo-breaking and radically honest account of love, friendship and sex work. This serial memoir follows Charlotte over the course of several years as she falls in and out of love, muses on the nature of sex work and the value of beauty, discovers hidden emotional complexities and contemplates leaving her profession.

ONE GREAT SUMMER TO LOOK FORWARD TO

Bliss & Blunder by Victoria Gosling

An inventive, magisterial reworking of the King Arthur legend for the 21st century and a heartrending novel of power, friendship and betrayal.

Girlfriend on Mars by Deborah Willis

A satirically funny, poignant and dark novel for fans of cool contemporary fiction. Follow weed-growing couple Kevin and Amber as Amber is selected for a reality TV to win a one-way ticket to Mars.

Cheri by Jo Ann Beard

A masterpiece of fiction and memory, Cheri is a heart-breaking but glorious celebration of all the moments of beauty and pain that make an individual life, right up until its very last moments.

Winner of a PEN Translates Award

‘The whole world through a single cell: frightening and funny, absurd and all too real’ Julia Phillips, author of Disappearing Earth
‘As unpredictable as it is damning’ Wall Street Journal
‘Kira Yarmysh has succeeded in creating a sensitive, angry, and often funny portrait of Russian society’ Deutsche Welle

When Anya is arrested at a Moscow anti-corruption rally under false pretences, she is given a 10-day sentence at a detention centre. Her cellmates are five other ordinary women arrested on petty charges.

Ten listless days stretch before Anya and, as she appeals her sentence and recalls her progress from apolitical youth to informed citizen, she is troubled by strange, dreamlike visions, and wonders if her cellmates might somehow not be as ordinary as they seem.

A brilliant exploration of what it means to be marginalized both as an independent woman and in an increasingly intolerant Russia in particular, The Incredible Events in Women’s Cell Number Three introduces one of the most urgent and gripping new voices in international literature.

Read an extract below.

Order your copy: Waterstones | Bookshop.org

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DAY ONE

If you asked Anya which day in prison had been the most trying, she would say the first. It had seemed both insane and endless. Prison time was elastic: it stretched out interminably, only to then fly like an arrow.

It started with her waking up on a clammy, impermeable mattress in a detention cell in a Moscow police department. She had been arrested the day before, but her efforts to outrun the riot police, her journey in the police bus, and her registration at the police department had kept her busy enough to all but overlook how it had ended. The reality of being in police custody struck her only once she was locked in that cell.

She had spent the night tossing and turning on the mattress, trying to pull her top down to avoid her body coming into contact with the oilcloth. The mattress was on the floor, there were no pillows, no blankets, and it was impossible to get comfortable. Either the arm under her head went numb or she got pins and needles in her side. She could only tell that she had managed to get some fitful sleep when she jerked awake, which happened many times.

What the time was, she had no idea. The cell was windowless, with only a dim light bulb above the door, which stayed on night and day. Her phone had been taken from her. Each time she woke, for want of anything else to do, she entertained herself by inspecting the wall in front of her: the peeling paint that looked like crushed eggshells; the suspicious streaks whose origins she preferred not to think about; the graffiti: Lex, Up Biryulyovo!, Allahu Akbar. Waking up one last time with a jolt, Anya realized she was not imagining it: she could feel a tremor under the floor, the metro must be open, morning had arrived.

The police department began coming to life, as Anya could hear through her cell door, which had been left ajar overnight. A kindly, older cop had not locked it but left it open a handbreadth. (A chain on the outside ensured she opened it no farther.) She lay, listening to the police arguing among themselves in the reception area, the telephone ringing off the hook, the rasping of a door lock, water flushing in a toilet she was eventually taken to visit. A policeman let her in and stayed outside to keep the door shut.

Anya dithered and looked around her. A scene from Trainspotting came to mind, where the main character goes to “the worst toilet in Scotland.” He had clearly seen nothing like the one in the Tverskaya
police department, with its chipped tile floor awash with murky fluid. A rusty chain hung from the water tank, and as for the toilet itself, it was a hole in the ground. Anya decided against going anywhere near
it. Running the faucet for appearances’ sake, while avoiding all contact with the squishy remnant of soap on the filthy edge of the washbasin, she emerged, and the policeman took her back to the cell.

Time passed with demoralizing slowness. Her cell door was now shut tight and did not allow in any outside sounds. She ran her eyes over the walls, which were barely visible in the dim light, but it was
an unrewarding pastime. She felt heavy and clumsy from lack of sleep, and thoughts stirred sluggishly in her head. Anya could not tell how long she sat like that. Her heart seemed to begin beating more slowly
and she felt she was sinking into a trancelike state; perhaps, indeed, suspended animation. When the door opened and a policeman came into the cell, Anya was startled, not sure what was happening.

She was taken through to the reception desk and told to sit on a bench next to a sad-eyed woman who looked Roma, a young guy who was drunk, and a man with a large black eye. The fatherly cop who
had left her door partly open took the box of her belongings out of a closet. “Get yourself together,” he said. “You have to go to the court hearing.” Anya turned on her phone, quickly checked her messages,
put her belt back on and laced up her sneakers. (The laces had been taken from her before she had spent the night in the cell.)

“Don’t make too much effort,” the cop advised. “You’re going to court.”

A taboo-breaking and radically honest account of love, friendship and sex work.

A Stylist ‘Non-fiction You Can’t Miss’ selection for 2023

‘Addictive, intimate . . .’ VICE

‘[Prostitute Laundry] is so beautiful and so heartbreaking. It’s a book that makes me feel a little less alone.’  New York Times Book Podcast

‘Stunning writing …  everything from high end sex work to the emotional labour of long-term relationships for women.’ Arifa Akbar, author of Consumed

This serial memoir follows Charlotte over the course of several years as she falls in and out of love, muses on the nature of sex work and the value of beauty, discovers hidden emotional complexities and contemplates leaving her profession. Growing out of a series of confessional letters sent by the author to a small but devoted mailing list, her candid, unstinting and sometimes heart-breaking meditations have gained thousands of subscribers and a cult status.

Prostitute Laundry is a deeply thoughtful book about sensuality, money, and identity – how those forces can break us, and how they can make us whole again. By turns philosophical, funny and explicit, this is an affecting, immediate account of one life lived to its fullest.

Read the sneak peak below.

Order your copy

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Searching

Bleak Week

February 8, 2014

This week, my most frequent regular said he’d come up with an idea. One of us would give the other explicit sexual instructions (that the other was free to refuse) but the one being instructed couldn’t do anything spontaneously. They simply had to obey. He said I could choose who took which role and that was easy—I said he should be in charge. It’s no secret that many sex workers hate the ubiquitous “tell me what you want to do” client line.

But I wasn’t off the hook yet. Because he added that whoever obeyed this time would have to instruct next time, and then he proceeded to cheat. “Put your hand on my hand and guide me,” he said with his fingers between my legs. “Put your hands on my head and guide me,” he said later. He asked for 69 by prefacing it with, “I know you don’t like this”—or “I know this isn’t your favorite,” maybe, which is so mildly stated that it’s almost a lie—“but since I’m the one deciding . . .”

I thought about this for days. Normally he is someone I like and feel warmly toward, but the fond regards now felt poisoned by reality: he hires me, I do what he wants. Why did he preface the request with admission of his knowledge? Why not pretend he forgot? Why announce the irrelevancy of my pleasure or desires when it comes to his own enjoyment? This is a man who has said he loves me, with whom I’ve spent copious amounts of time since we met three years ago.

I tried to think of an instance when I’d done something like that to someone else, and I succeeded. Years ago, when my boyfriend and I were still relatively new, I asked him to let me go down on him for a while even though I knew he didn’t really like it. I wanted to convince him to like it and I thought I had a decent chance of pulling it off. But I couldn’t, so I didn’t ask it of him again. I wish I knew then what I know now, which is to trust another person’s knowledge of their body enough to not force sensation, no matter how much you might like stimulating them that way. I was in my early 20s at the time.

There are lots of examples of men ignoring what I tell them I don’t like, and those men are not all clients. But they are men in their 30s, 40s, 50s, beyond. They should have learned better a long time ago. It happens with anal penetration, with receiving oral. Normally I endure more than I deny at work. But if I see an opportunity for discussion or just can’t take it anymore, I’ll say, “I don’t really like that” or “That doesn’t feel good.” It’s very rare that this makes anyone stop. Even outside of work, when I immediately tell guys not to go down on me, they’ll try to dive between my legs and change my mind. If only they knew how many other mouths have tried, I think, forgetting that even then they wouldn’t be dissuaded.

My boyfriend has a habit of pinching or sucking on my nipples whenever I’m topless around him. I sleep naked, and I change clothes in front of him. We shower together. I know, without fail, that in these circumstances he’s going to reach for my nipples in spite of the fact that I’ve told him many times not to do it and that I don’t like it, in spite of me crossing my arms over my chest, actively resisting him, moving away, whining “no” while it happens. This is from someone I’ve been with for many years. He knows what I do for work, but perhaps makes no connection between what I tolerate there and what I tolerate at home. Or, the more probable option—feels entitled because of what I allow at work.

I don’t like being this pessimistic and cynical and angry about sex, especially when I used to sincerely love it, but I don’t have many moments of sexual joy. The ones I try to create can backfire and seem not worth the risk, leaving me more disenchanted than I was before. A few months ago I managed the mundane rape attempts of a very large, condom-less man who didn’t even pay me for my troubles. It wasn’t traumatic, but it was a frustrating, stupid waste of time and energy that deepened my bitterness.

The way I feel about sex corresponds with the way I feel about (straight) men in general, and vice versa, which makes it all the more fatiguing. I hate dwelling on this evidence, but it keeps accumulating. Fairly frequently, a man says he loves me, but then communicates that his urge to use my body in a certain way is more important than any displeasure it brings me, more important than my right to say no. “Why don’t you care when I say I don’t like it?” I should ask. “Why does my unhappiness enhance your pleasure, or impact it so negligibly that it’s still worth it?” But I don’t think I would ever get an honest answer. At least not one I couldn’t already arrive at on my own.

Meet the legendary author of the anti-memoir Wish I Was Here.

– M. John Harrison created Wish I Was Here out of two hundred thousand words of notes taken over a period of roughly fifty years. ‘So there’s probably another book in the remaining one hundred & fifty thousand somewhere…’ he says.

– Neil Gaiman’s favourite work by M. John Harrison is the Viriconium sequence, which he calls ‘fascinating and delightful’ and for which he wrote the introduction for a U.S. edition.

– His most nominated and awarded novel is Nova Swing; It won the Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick Awards and was nominated for the British Science Fiction Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the John W. Campbell Award.

– One of his own favourite works of his is Climbers, a novel about his other passion—rock climbing—which was widely rejected by the climbing community.

–  Though he has been labelled as ‘one of the restless fathers of modern S[ci-]F[i]’ by Robert Macfarlane and a foundational writer in the development of the New Weird, Harrison rejects stylistic categorisation—unsurprising for a self-identified anarchist.

 

Wish I Was Here comes out 25th May. Order yours here.

Two-time Booker Shortlistee and internationally bestselling author Esi Edugyan delivers a searing analysis of the relationship between race and art.

‘A remarkable set of essays unlike anything else’ – Kadish Morris, Guardian

As in her fiction, the essays in Out of the Sun demonstrate Esi Edugyan’s commitment to seeking out the stories of Black lives that history has failed to record. Written with the death of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the background, in five wide-ranging essays Edugyan reflects on her own identity and experiences as the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants.

She delves into the history of Western Art and the truths about Black lives that it fails to reveal, and the ways contemporary Black artists are reclaiming and reimagining those lives. She explores and celebrates the legacy of Afrofuturism, the complex and problematic practice of racial passing, the place of ghosts and haunting in the imagination, and the fascinating relationship between Africa and Asia dating back to the 6th Century.

With calm, piercing intelligence, and a refusal to think on anyone’s terms but her own, Edugyan asks difficult questions about how we reckon with the past and imagine the future, and invites the reader to think alongside her in working out what the answers to these may be.

Buy your copy here.

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Europe and the Art of Seeing

2.

Many years ago, I found myself in the overstuffed halls of Scone Palace in Scotland. I’d been living some hours away, in a castle perched above the great Midlothian fields to the south, a guest at a writers’ residency. I wanted to see more of the country before I had to leave it. The castle I’d been living at had had an air both calm and frantic. The days were lazy, open, shaped only by a sprawling evening meal shared between the residents. During the afternoons, no one was allowed to speak, to avoid disturbing others. I would walk the grounds with a fellow Canadian, a lovely writer from an island on our East coast who, as a connoisseur of human absurdity, told outrageous stories as we crossed fields as pristine and uninhabited as some imagine the outer planets to be. I adored it there but it was frustrating too – the silence was broken by the phone ringing at every hour, the castle’s Dame calling to check up on the residency’s steward, a thin, hassled man with an explosion of tawny curls who ran about in a state of panic and subservience, terrified that at any moment she might, like a figure of nightmare, leap from a closed cupboard. There were the little skirmishes between the writers, the little jealousies and romances. It is churlish, I know, to complain about staying in a castle. But it was with some relief – and some sadness as well – that I set out north.

Scone Palace was another world. One approached it in much the same way one creeps towards a mirage, with a sense it is possibly fraudulent. Built in the Georgian Gothic style, it was a dark, hulking mass high above the River Tay. At the heart of its gardens lay an exquisite maze; I have always had a terror and an attraction to mazes, drawn by their complications but knowing that to enter them with my sense of direction is to risk having the search party called out. The interiors of the Palace were as lavish as its exterior walls were stark, the rooms filled with lush velvet chairs, blue-and-gold silk rugs, draperies and mantles and chandeliers that spoke of aristocratic Georgian excess. Passing through the Gothic library into the Ambassador’s room, I was surprised by a portrait of two very elegant young women. It was for many reasons unusual, not the least because one of the sitters was a Black, or bi-racial, woman.

The piece, painted in 1778, was until the 1990s referred to as simply the portrait of Lady Elizabeth Murray. The presence of her darker companion, though central, was completely overlooked. Variously attributed to the German neoclassical painter Johan Zoffany and the British artist Joshua Reynolds, the painting is now been believed to be the work of Scottish artist David Martin, based on the style, the clothing, and the sitters’ gestures. In the portrait, which has an air of arresting strangeness to it, Lady Elizabeth is dressed in a muted pink and white gown, her porcelain skin rouged, her expression full of warmth and mischief, her pale hand holding a book as a sign of her intellect. To her left, as if captured mid-stride, is Dido Elizabeth Belle, the young woman of colour. She was in fact Lady Elizabeth’s cousin, the two motherless girls raised together. She too looks mischievous and happy, but her movement marks her as physically irrepressible against Elizabeth’s restraint. Her station is further marked by the platter of fruit she is carrying for her mistress, and by the soft outstretched grip of Lady Elizabeth’s hand on her wrist – a gesture of affection, yes, but also seemingly one of possession. On Belle’s head she wears a white turban with a feather, a stand-in for the “Oriental,” the exotic. These signal her unbreakable link to the world of the “Other.”

The renowned scholar Edward Said described the Orient as “the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.” For much of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the idea of the Orient was set up in opposition to European ideals of rationality, civilization and modernity. Because much of what was then considered “the Orient” was partly located in Northern Africa, a transference got made: any African or person of African descent could be linked to notions of Orientalism. From this transference emerged the figure of the Moor. The Moor was not at first an actual Black person, but a watery, elusive, generalized North African figure without a fixed racial identity. By the 19^th century, however, she became more deeply grounded in her Blackness, though still carrying faint strains of the far-East.

 

 

Slavery had long been a feature of European expansionism, from the Barbarian invasions of the Roman empire to enslavement in the eastern Mediterranean and Russia. Most of these slaves were white. This changed with the shift towards Africa in the mid-1400s. More than twelve million people left sub-Saharan Africa, some passing through the Middle East and North Africa before being shipped to the colonies. The Atlantic trade continued for nearly four hundred years, changing the character of every place it touched. This included the physical makeup of many nations’ populations. From the 15^th century onward, the Black presence became more pronounced throughout Europe, particularly in port cities. As a result of this increased visibility, Blacks began to appear more frequently in art. Due to their condition as slaves, their representation was usually in some way linked to this reality. This is not to say that the people depicted are always images of living breathing figures; they only rarely derive from actual sitters, or public figures. Rather, they are visual manifestations of an idea of Blackness, an idea informed by slavery.

The European relationship to slavery was very different from its American counterpart. In England, for example, where riches poured in from the colonies to build great cities and underwrite upper-class lives, few Englishmen had any real contact with slavery beyond the knowledge of its existence as something going on “over there.” Very few Englishmen settled in the colonies to run plantations; instead planters employed proxies, “overseers,” to run things, living distant, comfortable lives across the waters.

And so portraiture of Blacks was tied to an imagined idea of Black people, and of all that Blackness could suggest. The African became a stand-in for the expression a multitude of conflicting beliefs and ideas. A Black face could be used to symbolize the darkness of the non-Christian world, or conversely, to signify the spread of Christianity throughout the continents. It could be one thing, or its opposite, or both at the same time, the conflicting meanings left to coexist.

It is slaves living in grand houses rather than those living on plantations who are most present in portraiture from the 16^th to the late 18^th centuries. They appear in so-called “grand-manner” paintings, in which the wealthy are pictured in idealized settings, meant to emphasize and capture that status for all eternity. To have a portrait painted was, whatever other impulses informed it, an expression of power. And in these portraits, Black servants are often shown staring adoringly up at their masters, their heads wound in colourful turbans and robes whose brightness make an obvious contrast against the more sober and elegant clothes of their betters. In the Academy, colour was believed to appeal to the senses and was measured against drawing, which was thought to appeal to the intellect. This dichotomy between wildness and reason was seen to govern the races, too, according to Enlightenment era theory. And so passionate colours were tied to passionate people, while a lack of colour expressed civility and intelligence.

In his extravagant dress, a Black pageboy became the literal embodiment of his master’s riches, his servitude sometimes made clear by a silver ring in his ear or a silver collar around his neck. Black musicians and court performers also served to express this wealth. They are fantasias of slave life, implying a satisfaction with one’s lowly role, and the implicit superiority of the master or mistress, whose dignified bearing cannot help but instill deference. The images glorified a world so far divorced from the penury of plantation labour, from the brutalities of the transatlantic voyage, that the gulf is astonishing.

 

There also lived in Europe many people of African descent who were not slaves. Many children from mixed-race relationships been taken to England, and this is the group to which Dido Elizabeth Belle belonged. Belle was the illegitimate daughter of Maria Belle, a probable African slave, who was captured from a Spanish ship in the West Indies by her father, Rear Admiral Sir John Lindsay, nephew of the most powerful judge in the country, Lord Mansfield. After the death of her mother when she was six years old, Belle’s father took her to England to be raised in Lord Mansfield’s home in a manner befitting their rank. Lady Elizabeth had also been sent to live at Kenwood after the loss of her own mother, so that the two girls must have shared what I imagine was a sense of blind-siding devastation mixed with shocking good luck, a feeling of forced renunciation that was a both a relief and something to resent. And yet, though the details remain somewhat obscure, it’s said that the positions they occupied in the household were very different. Lady Elizabeth – pale-skinned, light-eyed – was in all respects treated as the vulnerable family member she was. Belle’s lot was murkier. She was not quite sister, not quite servant, asked only sometimes to dine with guests; only when the plates were scraped and the coffees drained was she invited to sit with the ladies and take a turn about the gardens with them. An American expatriate in London, Francis Hutchison, described with surprise the sight of Belle walking arm in arm with her cousin. He seemed uneasy at the affection with which the great judge himself treated “the Black,” and he was not the only one.

Some felt that Lord Mansfield had allowed his love for Belle to cloud his judgment. In 1772, he made a landmark ruling in the case of the runaway slave James Somerset; in it, he decreed that a master could not take a slave out of Britain by force. This ruling was largely viewed as a key piece of legislation in the eventual abolishment of the slave trade. A recent biographer of Lord Mansfield has suggested that the great judge was less anti-slavery crusader than someone who disliked slavery but was reluctant to annoy slave owners or appear to threaten their financial interests, and that he hoped things could carry on as they’d been. And yet Mansfield made the ruling as he did, in full awareness of the shockwaves it would send through English society. We will never know how much his love for Dido played into this decision that would reshape the modern world.