flora

A Today Show Most Anticipated Book of 2023
An Electric Literature Recommendation for 2023
A Goodreads Buzziest Debut of 2023

‘A beautiful ode to the power of storytelling’ Eleanor Shearer

‘A brilliant, compelling exploration of familial legacies. A mythic and edifying read’ Irenosen Okojie, author of Speak Gigantular

Growing up in Brooklyn with their Caribbean parents, Zora and Sasha Porter’s days were enchanted by stories from the islands – the mischievous spider Anansi both seductive and vengeful; the flame-breathing Rolling Calf who haunts butchers; and ocean-dwelling Mama Dglo, said to be half snake, half human.

Now they are teenagers, and life at home has become unbearable. Their parents’ tempestuous relationship has fallen apart, their mother Beatrice desperately ill, their father Nigel living with another woman. While an unsettled Zora escapes into her journal, dreaming of being a writer, Sasha discovers sex and chest binding, spending more time with her new girlfriend than at home. 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.

The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts is an extraordinary debut novel, a celebration of the power of stories that asks – what happens when ours are erased? Do we disappear? Or do we come back haunting?

Read the opening below.

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PROLOGUE

What’s My Name?

A Prelude

By the time you finish reading this I will be dead and you, dear reader, will have forgotten all about me.

You see I am what they call Your Faithful Narrator, found in places the West calls fairy tales, what men call gossip, what children call magic. Let me tell you a story. This one we call the first. It is a story that sounds like all the others, and yet it is also the one that has allowed for the existence of all that will come afterward—but we’ll get to that.

In this story, two women sit inside a bar. The first one says, “Let me tell you a story.” The second says, “So, tell me already!” “Okay, okay,” she goes. “Once upon a time, there was a girl,” she starts and looks into her drink. Her tongue starts to hang out like an udon noodle. “Well, go on,” the friend says, mistaking her hanging tongue for excitement. Only the girl’s tongue won’t move. The girl’s breath is fixed in midair. Her lips form the letter O. Her friend pricks the tongue with her fork to see what’s the matter, and the tongue falls out and skitters like worms on the ground. The bartender scoops up all the pieces he can find, and they wriggle in his hands. He worries about the mess he’s made. He asks the friend to fetch a jar and cap from the top shelf of the bar in order to contain the skittering tongue pieces. He looks down and notices no blood—only eraser dust.

The bartender thinks this is strange, but he goes to the bar to fetch his needle and thread. He begins to sew the tongue back together for the girl. This is a very difficult job for the man, as the pieces of her tongue keep moving. Like the tongue doesn’t want to be caught. Mountains of eraser dust are flying from her mouth, getting all over the floor. Her breath stands before them. The bartender does a good job of mending except that he sews her tongue onto a piece of paper and stuffs it into her mouth. The girl and her friend rejoice as the girl begins to speak again. But every time she tries to tell her story, the words come out backward. The ending changes.

Let me tell you a story. This one will give you hope. Once upon a time there was a girl. And this girl grew to be a woman. And this woman had the ability to conjure stories from ghosts. Now the conjure woman had three daughters who loved her stories so much that when she died it was all that she left them. Little did they know that these stories had a life before them. That this book had a life before me.

You see, the woman and her family existed in a place called Brooklyn where the maples lined the pavement, and the houses were made from limestone and brownstone that glittered like stars do under moonlight. It must have been divine providence that whitefolks refused to live on these streets, believing they were haunted, therefore leaving the most beautiful houses to be claimed by the descendants of slaves from all across the Atlantic.

Whitefolks were not entirely wrong about the haunting either. If you were to walk down these streets, you might hear the faint sound of steel drum and boom box and chickadee and pigeon. Or you might hear the chattering of ghosts—the spirits of colonialists, Ashanti warriors, slave holders, African griots, mythic creatures, and stories long since forgotten. But while whitefolks may call this a haunting, we know them to be the ancestors. After all, they only want to be able to walk through their homes like they did before their deaths—to sit in the kitchen drinking Milo, bestowing wisdom onto their children who are at risk of forgetting all about them.

Now this family lived in the only rose-colored building at the end of Maple Street. The youngest called herself Zora or She Who Will One Day Grow Up to Be a Great Writer Like Her Namesake. She could be found conjuring her mother’s words into stories or if not, she could be caught, face flushed with embarrassment, fantasizing about a boy or two.

And then there was Sasha, the eldest, who felt her story should shine brightest for once. Commonly referred to as the Black Sheep or She Who Nearly Disappeared Until She Found Her True Self—this girl did have spunk. They say the girl had a chip on her shoulder the size of El Tucuche Mountain for nearly everyone, but particularly for her father who, legend had it, defeated a Rolling Calf with only a penknife and the power of his gaze.

A nephew. An uncle.

A Mountain to the North, A Lake to the South, Paths to the West, A River to the East

The grandson of Prince Genji lives outside of space and time and wanders the grounds of an old monastery in Kyoto. The monastery, too, is timeless, with barely a trace of any human presence. The wanderer is searching for a garden that has long captivated him.

This novel by International Booker Prize winner László Krasznahorkai – perhaps his most serene and poetic work – describes a search for the unobtainable and the riches to be discovered along the way. Despite difficulties in finding the garden, the reader is closely introduced to the construction processes of the monastery as well as the geological and biological processes of the surrounding area, making this an unforgettable meditation on nature, life, history, and being.

László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954. He has written five novels and won numerous prizes, including the 2013 Best Translated Book Award in Fiction for Satantango, the same prize the following year for Seiobo There Below, and the 1993 Best Book of the Year Award in Germany for The Melancholy of Resistance. He won the Man Booker International Prize in 2015 rewarding an outstanding body of work. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in the hills of Pilisszentlászló in Hungary.

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II

The train did not run along tracks, but along a single terrifying blade edge, so that the balanced order of the city traffic with its ominous frenzy and trembling inner panic that announced the arrival of the Keihan train was the beginning — to get out at Shichijō Street, on the side where the Rashōmon, now vanished without a trace, had once stood in the Fukuine district, and suddenly the buildings were different, the streets were different, as if at once the colors and forms had been lost, he sensed he was already outside the city limits, altogether with a single stop he was outside of Kyoto, although of course the city’s deepest secrets were not lost here, and especially so quickly; and so there he was, to the south, the southeast of Kyoto, and he started off from there along the narrow and labyrinthine streets, turning to the left or continuing straight ahead, then turning to the left again, and in the end he should have been beset by the greatest of doubts, and as a matter of fact he was, and yet he didn’t stop, he made no inquiries and asked no directions, precisely the opposite: he went on asking nothing, he did not reflect, he did not hesitate at this or that corner, wondering: which way now, because something suggested to him that he would still find what he was looking for; the streets were empty, the shops were closed, now it seemed as if there weren’t even anyone to ask for directions because somehow everything was deserted as if there were a holiday somewhere, or some kind of problem — but somewhere else far away from here, and from the viewpoint of that faraway place this tiny district was of no interest, whoever had been here had left, everyone, to the last man, gone, not even a stray child or a noodle seller remained, no head suddenly pulled back from motionless watching behind a window grating, as one might have expected around here on a sunny, peaceful late afternoon, he established that he was alone; and he turned to the left, then he went straight on again, then he suddenly noticed that for a while the ground had been rising, the streets on which he walked, whether heading to the left or straight, had, for a while, been unequivocally leading upward, he could not establish anything more certain than that, could not say whether the incline had begun in this or that specific spot, instead there was a kind of realization, a determined overall sense: the entirety, along with him, had been ascending for a while — he reached a long enclosure wall running to the left of him, unornamented and constructed from mud bricks assembled into bamboo framework, it was painted white, its upper edge laid with crosswise, slightly battered turquoise-blue roof tiles; the footpath ran along it for some length, and nothing happened, he couldn’t see anything above the wall as it had been built too high for someone to glimpse what was on the other side, there was no window, tiny door, or even a crack-sized opening; when he reached the corner, he turned to the left and from there, for a bit longer, the path followed the wall closely until finally it came to an end, its direction cumulating in a refined bridge of light wooden construction that appeared to be floating, precisely because of its refined and light character; it was covered by a roof constructed of cypress bark, its columns made of cypress wood, burnished to perfection and supporting the soft, rain-battered flooring that swayed gently when stepped upon, and on either side: there were depths, and everything was green.

On a balmy evening in late March, an oligarch’s wife hosts a party on a superyacht moored in the Maldives. Tables cover the massive deck, adorned with orchids, champagne bottles, name cards of celebrities. Uniformed staff flank a red carpet on the landing dock. This is what Kata has wanted for a long time: acceptance into the glittering world of high society. But there are those who aim to come between Kata and her goal, and they are closer to home than she could have imagined.

Witness to the corruption and violence underneath the shiny surfaces is Mel, a young English woman employed to tutor Kata’s precocious daughter and navigate her through the class codes of English privilege. Now the closest Mel gets to such privilege is as hired help to the wealthy, and she is deeply resentful.

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.

Coming February 2023.

Pre-order your copy

Request on NetGalley

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I went to dinner with some old school friends the other night and before I’d been there ten minutes they were asking me about that family I used to work for, the billionaires. Everyone does that. Everyone’s heard the story and knows I was there that night. ‘Something crazy happened, didn’t it,’ they say, ‘with that oligarch’s wife; didn’t she just disappear or something?’ They look at me and depending on the mood I’m in I brush them off with an arch quip or I try quite seriously to explain it all: how it came to that, how Kata got it so badly wrong.

On this particular night, I was looking at those girls from school arrayed around the dinner table, in their merino knits, comfortable in their professions: lawyer; TV producer; book editor. I caught the whiff of glibness, that I was being patronised. ‘So exotic!’ said Charlotte. ‘Being a tutor. Makes office life seem very boring!’

Charlotte had seen I was in the country from one of my Instagram stories. I’d been packing up the last of Mum’s stuff and found a big book of photographs, all these pictures from Mum’s youth, on the seafront at Dartmouth with the sailing yachts behind her, hair blown about by that south-coast wind.

‘Wow, you look like her!’ Charlotte said. ‘Come to dinner on your way back through London. I’ll invite some of the others.’

When Charlotte led me down the hall to her kitchen it all came back to me: the lust I used to have for houses like this, the sounds of the street dying away as we passed a sitting room with heavy curtains, a faded sofa full of cushions, a fireplace and, on either side of the fireplace, blue and white china urns. Charlotte had seemed so helpless to me when we first met aged thirteen, both new at a girls’ boarding school in the West Country. There was some incident in the library, a mouse ran over her books and she screamed, then people followed her round chanting: ‘Library Mouse, Library Mouse.’ It irritated me, and one night in the dinner queue I told everyone how lame they were being. ‘Teasing Charlotte is mean and lazy, it also happens to be totally risk free. Now, how about her,’ I said, pointing to this girl a few years above us, someone beautiful and fascinating and tyrannical, known to be vicious in her punishments.

Push up, not down, I suppose is what I meant. Back then, I saw Charlotte as someone in need of my protection. It’s relentless, isn’t it, our need to order ourselves, to form hierarchies? When we were kids together at that school we were ordered by our wits, it was cruel and merciless. In the end of course we are ordered by our capital: it is cruel, it is merciless.

I think I was always aware Mum was heading towards an act of mortal stupidity, but I never saw it coming with Kata. Two such weak women. I grew up wishing my mother could have tried to hide her weaknesses from me, that she could at least have pretended to be some kind of a safe haven. So I could understand very well Alex’s feelings towards Kata, and I could even understand the role she played in the whole sad thing. She clung on to love for her mother for a long time, before that love turned to disgust. She was so sweet and so gentle, my little pupil. I could never quite work it out: was she someone I needed to protect or was she undeserving of my protection, simply because she was so rich?

The email notification was on my phone: my return flight to Vienna the very next day, my apartment, my new life. It really was there, waiting for me. I brought it all up before me in my mind: drinking a cup of coffee in my kitchen, dressing and getting on the underground to the kindergarten where I worked, late afternoons in the cafés, evenings with Jakob and friends. I called it to myself and felt its warmth fill me, then expand outwards. It radiated through Charlotte and the others, and Charlotte’s million- pound house in Clapham that her parents had bought her. I separated Charlotte from my envy, for just a moment: I looked at her across the table, at her face as she lifted the bottle of wine brought it towards my glass, the light freckles over her nose and the top of her cheeks, and for a moment I thought, Maybe we are all helpless, maybe we are all hostage. I think Kata was helpless and hostage from the beginning to the end of her life, and she was the richest of us all.

 

AUGUST 2022: ALL OF YOU EVERY SINGLE ONE

This month, we’ve chosen Beatrice Hitchman’s All Of You Every Single One for our Serpent’s Tail Book Club pick. This is an exhilarating queer love story set in early twentieth-century Vienna and has recently been longlisted for the Polair Prize for LGBTQ+ literature. Scroll down for more about this gripping novel, reading questions and to apply for a set of books for your book group.

Find more about the Serpent’s Tail Book Club and FAQs here.

 

ABOUT THE BOOK

An exhilarating queer love story set in early twentieth-century Vienna

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Beatrice Hitchman is an author and academic. Her first novel Petite Mort was nominated for the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Polari Prize, the HWA Debut Prize and the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Prize. She currently works as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Brighton.

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READING GROUP QUESTIONS

1. If you could spend one day and one night in Julia and Eve’s Vienna, what would you do in that time?
2. Dora (A Case Study) by Sigmund Freud bears a loose relation to the character of Ada. What do you think about the ways that the true nature of Ada’s suffering is rendered in the book and how it compares to that of the historical individual?
3. Eve and Julia weather a number of storms over the course of their relationship but remain loyal to one another. What becomes the focus of their story when the possibility of lasting romantic love is no longer in question?
4. If you could run away and start over again, where would you go? How have things changed between 1911 and today for people who need a fresh start?
5. Frau Berndt points out that the group’s plan to rescue Elsa plays into some peoples’ worst stereotypes about queer and Jewish people, but with a benevolent aim in mind. How do the characters use their identities (perceived or real) to subvert people’s expectations of them?
6. Do you believe that Isabella ever really felt anything for Ada? How much do you think she knew about Emil’s behaviour?
7. How do the events of the first half of the novel prepare the reader for the second half, after the time jump?
8. Was it fair for Eve and Julia to keep the identity of Elsa’s biological parents a secret from her into her adulthood?
9. What do you think the metronome signifies for Max and Elsa?
10. Frau Berndt thinks of the friends as all being her children. How do the characters expand and challenge the definition of a family over the course of the novel?

 

Beatrice Hitchman is an author and academic. Her first novel Petite Mort was nominated for the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Polari Prize, the HWA Debut Prize and the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Prize. She currently works as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Brighton.

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READING GROUP QUESTIONS

1. If you could spend one day and one night in Julia and Eve’s Vienna, what would you do in that time?
2. Dora (A Case Study) by Sigmund Freud bears a loose relation to the character of Ada. What do you think about the ways that the true nature of Ada’s suffering is rendered in the book and how it compares to that of the historical individual?
3. Eve and Julia weather a number of storms over the course of their relationship but remain loyal to one another. What becomes the focus of their story when the possibility of lasting romantic love is no longer in question?
4. If you could run away and start over again, where would you go? How have things changed between 1911 and today for people who need a fresh start?
5. Frau Berndt points out that the group’s plan to rescue Elsa plays into some peoples’ worst stereotypes about queer and Jewish people, but with a benevolent aim in mind. How do the characters use their identities (perceived or real) to subvert people’s expectations of them?
6. Do you believe that Isabella ever really felt anything for Ada? How much do you think she knew about Emil’s behaviour?
7. How do the events of the first half of the novel prepare the reader for the second half, after the time jump?
8. Was it fair for Eve and Julia to keep the identity of Elsa’s biological parents a secret from her into her adulthood?
9. What do you think the metronome signifies for Max and Elsa?
10. Frau Berndt thinks of the friends as all being her children. How do the characters expand and challenge the definition of a family over the course of the novel?

 

We are delighted with the news that Booth, Karen Joy Fowler’s epic historical novel, has been longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022!

About the book

From the Booker-shortlisted, million-copy bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves comes an epic novel about the infamous, ill-fated Booth family.

Junius is the patriarch, a celebrated Shakespearean actor who fled bigamy charges in England, both a mesmerising talent and a man of terrifying instability. As his children grow up in a remote farmstead in 1830s rural Baltimore, the country draws ever closer to the boiling point of secession and civil war.
 
Of the six Booth siblings who survive to adulthood, each has their own dreams they must fight to realise – but it is Johnny who makes the terrible decision that will change the course of history – the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Booth is a riveting novel focused on the very things that bind, and break, a family.

Discover the full longlist

 

 

JULY 2022: BEFORE THE RUINS

This month, we’ve chosen Victoria Gosling’s suspenseful debut novel Before the Ruins for our Serpent’s Tail Book Club pick. This is a poignant and insightful book about lost love, the power of friendship and whether missed chances are really gone forever. Scroll down for more about this gripping novel, a Q&A from Victoria and to apply for a set of books for your book group. 

Find more about the Serpent’s Tail Book Club and FAQs here.

 

ABOUT THE BOOK

One long, hot summer Andy and her friends begin a game that will take their whole lives to play out.

‘Engrossing, beguiling, and with an undertow of menace, Before the Ruins is a masterly debut from a richly talented author.’ Sarah Waters

‘Jaw-droppingly brilliant writing’ Marian Keyes

Andy believes that she has left her past far behind her. But when she gets a call from Peter’s mother to say he’s gone missing, she finds herself pulled into a search for answers.

Bored and restless after their final school exams, Andy, Peter, Em and Marcus broke into a ruined manor house nearby and quickly became friends with the boy living there. Blond, charming and on the run, David’s presence was as dangerous as it was exciting. The story of a diamond necklace, stolen from the house fifty years earlier and perhaps still lost somewhere in the grounds inspired the group to buy a replica and play at hiding it, hoping to turn up the real thing along the way. But the game grew to encompass decades of resentment, lies and a terrible betrayal.

Now, Andy’s search for Peter will unearth unimaginable secrets – and take her back to the people who still keep them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Victoria Gosling grew up in Wiltshire and studied at Manchester University and the University of Amsterdam. She has lived in London, Australia, Brazil, the Czech Republic and Berlin. Victoria is the founder of The Reader Berlin and organises The Berlin Writing Prize. @victoriagosling

 

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Listen to Victoria’s Before the Ruins playlist below:

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Q&A WITH VICTORIA:

1. Your book is a coming-of-age story, a mystery and a thriller, with a touch of romance. Tell us about the process of writing across genres.

Initially, I was working on two separate ideas, or rather investigating two separate seams of material. One related to a group of teenagers playing a game at an abandoned manor house. The other seam was much more introspective. I had a sense of an older character, isolated, devoting herself to work and screens… then it became apparent that this character was an older version of Andy, one of the teenagers. I don’t plan novels so much as allow ideas to coalesce in my head and then try to make sense of the material. 

I was passionate about reading as a child and I think I’m always trying to satisfy both that reader—who wants missing diamonds, unsolved mysteries, murders—and a reader who is more literary-minded, who wants a response to the world in which we find ourselves, to the business of living. Only later did I realise that as a result the novel wasn’t clearly one genre or another. I hoped publishers would find it fresh but worried it’d be turned down as difficult to market. Fortunately, Serpent’s Tail saw something in it. I love their list and couldn’t be happier that Before the Ruins found a home on it.

2. Is there anything readers have picked up on that you weren’t expecting? 

I’ve had a couple of readers write to me saying they know where the diamonds are! Whether they were right or not, I cannot say…

3. Your writing has been compared to Agatha Christie, Tana French and Alan Hollinghurst. Who do you see as your writing influences?

As a child I did love Agatha Christie, particularly Crooked House. I also love Graham Greene for the compelling simplicity of his novels, and I read a lot of Joseph Conrad as a teenager. 

Discover more of Victoria’s literary influences over at her Bookshop.org shelf:

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READING GROUP QUESTIONS

1. What were your first impressions of Andy and how do they compare to your impressions of her at the end of the book?
2. Do you believe that the friends ever came into contact with the original diamonds?
3. How does the title relate to the events of the novel? Does it have more than one possible meaning?
4. Games and gameplaying are a recurring theme – can you describe some of the games that Andy and her friends play with each other apart from hiding the necklace?
5. What did you initially think had happened to Peter and why?
6. What is the importance of social media and surveillance technology in the novel? Is it different from the friends spying on one another in the Manor House?
7. Andy hope desperately for what she calls ‘magic’ at various points in her life. Do you think she encounters it?
8. During her meeting with Andy, Alice says ‘None of you seemed prone to telling the truth’. What is the biggest truth revealed in the novel? How does it change things?
9. What role does social class or the friends’ perceptions of it play in Before the Ruins?
10. How do you see Andy and David’s relationship evolving beyond the final pages?

 

First they get married, then they get buried

We are thrilled to share that Viper has been named Imprint of the Year at the British Book Awards!

The annual book industry awards were announced last night, and we couldn’t have been more excited when Viper was announced as the winner in the Imprint of the Year category. The award recognises our amazing bestsellers from Janice Hallett’s The Appeal to Catriona Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street, and publisher Miranda Jewess’s work on the list.

We have only been around for a few years but we’re very proud of the impact we’ve made. We’d like to say a huge thank you to all the authors, booksellers, bloggers, readers and everyone who’s helped us become an award-winning imprint.

Discover the Viper list

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JUNE 2022: IN THE DREAM HOUSE

We are thrilled to be launching our first ever Serpent’s Tail Book Club with Carmen Maria Machado’s incomparable In the Dream House. This is an unforgettable, genre-bending memoir of domestic violence in a queer relationship. We think it makes a great book group read for Pride Month.

Find more about the Serpent’s Tail Book Club and FAOs here.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In the Dream House is a revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the prizewinning author of Her Body and Other Parties.

‘Ravishingly beautiful’ Observer
‘Excruciatingly honest and yet vibrantly creative’ Irish Times

WINNER OF THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2021

In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing experience with a charismatic but volatile woman, this is a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse.

Each chapter views the relationship through a different lens, as Machado holds events up to the light and examines them from distinct angles. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction, infusing all with her characteristic wit, playfulness and openness to enquiry. The result is a powerful book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and In the Dream House, which was the winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is the Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

Follow Carmen on Instagram @carmenmariamachado

 

Discover Carmen’s literary influences over at her Bookshop.org shelf.

Listen to Carmen’s In the Dream House playlist

READING GROUP QUESTIONS

Much of the memoir concerns the missing evidence of queer lives and the incomplete archive of queer stories. How does Carmen Maria Machado explore this absence in the telling of her own story?

In ‘Dream House as an Exercise in Point of View’, Carmen divides herself into an ‘I’ and a ‘You’, which inform the narration that follows through the rest of the book. How often did these two versions of the character overlap in your reading, if at all, and how conscious did you remain of their separation?

The book explores the expectation that victims of abuse must provide evidence before people can believe them. How does this contradict or compliment the idea of the absence of the archive?

At what point in the story did the Woman’s behaviour towards Carmen turn from worrying to frightening in your eyes? Why?

What would constitute unacceptable behaviour in your own relationships?

What do you make of the idea that queer abuse is about homophobia, in the same way abuse in heterosexual relationships is about sexism?

Carmen Maria Machado often focuses on the corporeal in her writing, perhaps to ground aspects of magical realism. Where is the body situated in In the Dream House and how is it framed within the narrative?

In ‘Dream House as Time Travel’, one of the questions that has haunted Carmen is whether ‘knowing would have made [her] dumber or smarter’. What do you think?

Regarding the legal framework surrounding domestic abuse, alongside the film Gaslight, Carmen Maria Machado notes that the legal system does not provide protection against verbal, emotional and psychological abuse. Although now recognised as a legal cause of action in the UK as well as many US states, how do we talk about consequences for abuse when behaviour cannot be classified as illegal?

What do you imagine the Dream House looks like?

 

‘It’s when we’re most lost that the source of light is closest…’

We are so excited to be sharing with you the spine-tingling trailer for the TV adaptation of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent.

Starring Claire Danes as Cora and Tom Hiddleston as Will, The Essex Serpent follows London widow Cora Seaborne who moves to Essex to investigate reports of a mythical serpent. She forms an unlikely bond with the village vicar, Will, but when tragedy strikes, locals accuse her of attracting the creature. 

The Essex Serpent was first published in 2016. It was a Sunday Times bestseller and won Book of the Year at the British Book Awards as well as Waterstones Book of the Year.

Watch the trailer below – and get your copy in your local bookshop or via Waterstones, Amazon or Bookshop.org.

Coming 13th May to Apple TV.

The brilliant author of Woman’s-Prize-longlisted Detransition, Baby is coming to the UK! Find out where to see her, who she’s being interviewed by, and how to get tickets below.

FRIDAY 20 MAY, BRITISH LIBRARY with Shon Faye – TICKETS

SATURDAY 21 MAY, BATH FESTIVAL with Elizabeth Day – TICKETS

WEDNESDAY 25 MAY, STRANGE BREW BRISTOL with Travis Alabanza – TICKETS

THURSDAY 26 MAY, HAY FESTIVAL – TICKETS

FRIDAY 27 MAY, DUBLIN INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE FESTIVAL – TICKETS

We are thrilled that Alex Wheatle’s WITNESS, a thrilling, pacy story that is full of moral complexity and insight into gang violence, has been chosen as one of the World Book Night books for 2022.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

To tell the truth? Or protect his family?

Cornell is having a bad time. Kicked out of secondary school for a fight he didn’t start, he finds himself in a Pupil Referral Unit. Here he makes friends with one of the Sinclair family. You don’t mess with the Sinclairs, and when Ryan Sinclair demands Cornell comes with him to teach another student some respect, Ryan witnesses something that will change his life.

Torn between protecting his family and himself, Cornell has one hell of a decision to make.  

ABOUT WORLD BOOK NIGHT:

World Book Night is a national celebration of reading and books that takes place on 23 April every year. Print books are gifted throughout the UK and Ireland with a focus on reaching those who don’t regularly read for pleasure or have access to books, through organisations including prisons, libraries, colleges, hospitals, care homes and homeless shelters.

Witness is one of the Quick Reads titles, aiming to inspire emerging or lapsed readers to get back into books. One in six adults in the UK find reading difficult, and one in three people do not regularly read for pleasure. These books cost just £1 at bookshops, or are free at libraries across the country.

Take a look at the 2022 booklist, featuring Alex Wheatle’s WITNESS and find out how you can join in the celebrations on 23 April: https://worldbooknight.org/

Follow @WorldBookNight @readingagency and Alex Wheatle @brixtonbard

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From the Booker-shortlisted, million-copy bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves comes an epic novel about the infamous, ill-fated Booth family.

SIX BROTHERS AND SISTERS. ONE INJUSTICE THAT WILL SHATTER THEIR BOND FOREVER

Junius is the patriarch, a celebrated Shakespearean actor who fled bigamy charges in England, both a mesmerising talent and a man of terrifying instability. As his children grow up in a remote farmstead in 1830s rural Baltimore, the country draws ever closer to the boiling point of secession and civil war.

Of the six Booth siblings who survive to adulthood, each has their own dreams they must fight to realise – but it is Johnny who makes the terrible decision that will change the course of history – the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Booth is a riveting novel focused on the very things that bind, and break, a family.

Read an extract below.

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Sixteen years pass. The family grows, shrinks, grows. By 1838, the children number at nine, counting the one about to arrive and the four who are dead. Eventually there will be ten.

These children have:

A famous father, a Shakespearean actor, on tour more often than at home.

A paternal grandfather, skinny as a stork, with white hair worn in a single braid, his clothing also fifty years out of fashion, breech trousers and buckle shoes. He’s come from London to help out during their father’s long absences. He was once a lawyer, treasonably sympathetic to the American revolutionaries, enthusiastic for all things American. Visitors to his London house were made to bow before a portrait of George Washington. Now that he lives here, he hates it. He likens the farm to Robinson Crusoe’s island, himself a marooned castaway on its desolate shore. He’s rarely sober, which makes him less helpful than might have been hoped.

An indulgent mother. A dark- haired beauty with retiring manners, she’d once sold flowers from her family nursery on Drury Lane. She’d first seen their father onstage as King Lear and was astonished, when meeting him, to find that he was young and handsome. He’d had to perform the Howl, howl, howl speech right there in the London street before she’d believe he was the same man. “When will you spend a day with me?” he’d asked within minutes of learning her name. “Tomorrow?” and she’d surprised herself by saying yes.

During their brief courtship, he’d sent her ninety- three love letters, pressing his suit with his ambition, his ardor, the poems of Lord Byron, and the promise of adventure. Soon enough, she’d agreed to run away with him to the island of Madeira, and from there to America.

Perhaps adventure was more implied than promised outright. After they’d left their families in England, after they’d had their first child, after they’d arrived in Maryland and leased the farm on a thousand- year lease, after he’d arranged to move the cabin onto it, only then did he explain that he’d be touring without her nine months of every year. For nine months of every year, she’d be left here with his drunken father.

What else could he do? he asked, leaving no pause in which she might answer; he was a master of timing. He needed to tour if they planned to eat. And clearly, she and the baby couldn’t come along. There is nothing worse than an unhappy, complaining shrew for a wife, he’d finished, by way of warning. He didn’t plan on having one of those.

So here she’s been, on the farm, for sixteen years now. For seventeen years, almost without break, she’s been either expecting a baby or nursing one. It will be twenty continuous years before she’s done.

Later, she’ll tell their children it was Lord Byron’s poems that tipped the scales. She’ll mean this as a caution but she’ll know it won’t be taken as such. All her children love a good romance.

None of the children know that they’re a secret. It will come as quite a shock. They’ve no cause for suspicion. Much like the secret cabin, everyone they know knows they’re here.

The Appeal, the bestselling modern-day Agatha Christie by author Janice Hallett, has been shortlisted for the 2021 Waterstones Book of the Year!

The Appeal is – in Waterstones’ words – a gripping whodunnit set in a sleepy town during the amateur dramatics society’s disastrous performance. It was inspired by author Janice Hallett’s own lifelong interest in amateur dramatics. A bookseller favourite, the pitch-perfect debut went on to be Waterstones’ most successful Thriller of the Month and is now shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year.

Janice Hallett says: “To say I feel honoured The Appeal is on this shortlist would be a cliché and an understatement. It means the world to me that Waterstones has chosen to highlight a book that’s not only by a debut author, but also one that has an unusual, experimental structure. This demonstrates just how forward-thinking and fearless their booksellers are when it comes to championing new fiction. I can’t thank them enough for getting behind The Appeal.”

Bea Carvalho, Waterstones Head of Fiction, says: “In a brilliant year for Crime Fiction, The Appeal stood out for its playfulness, originality, and sheer enjoyability. A sharp, smart whodunnit which unfolds through a series of documents, allowing the reader to take on the role of detective, it is a highly addictive read which is the very definition of ‘unputdownable’. Our most successful Thriller of the Month ever, The Appeal has been championed by booksellers everywhere for good reason: it is cosy crime at its absolute best, and a pitch-perfect crowd-pleaser which begs to be reread and recommended.”

Waterstones have a glorious red hardback exclusive edition this Christmas – order your copy now!