Christmas comes around every year but we always have something to offer! Whether it be a favourite of yours now in paperback or a new read, this list has something for every book lover. Epic stories, poetry collections about dogs (aww!) and award-winning reads. What’s not to love?
We were thrilled to wake up this morning and discover that two of our books have won awards at the most prestigious literary prize ceremony in America, the National Book Awards.
Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, an electrifying novel telling of a #MeToo scandal at a drama school, has won the prize for fiction.
The judges said: ‘Trust Exercise by Susan Choi blends the intellectual rigor of post-modern technique with a story that is timely, mesmerizing, and, in the end, unsettling. The exploration of different character perspectives lays bare the myth-making of the self and the damage that storytelling can do to others. Choi’s virtuoso accomplishment on the sentence level is often extraordinary—and pivots in astonishing and non-traditional directions while conforming to traditional ideas of excellence.’
László Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, won the prize for translated literature. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming tells the story of a Prince Myshkin–like figure, Baron Béla Wenckheim, who returns at the end of his life to his provincial Hungarian hometown.
The judges said: ‘At the end of his life, Baron Wenckheim returns to a small town in Hungary, in search of his lost love. From this, László Krasznahorkai forges a fictional universe populated with rogues and visionaries, at once epic and intimate, apocalyptic and deeply comic. Ottilie Mulzet’s remarkable translation captures the density of his extended sentences, their many twists and pivots, and the slow accumulation of their extraordinary intellectual and moral force. Singular and uncompromising, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming is a masterpiece by one of the great writers of our time.’
Find out more at the National Book Awards website.
As you may have seen on social media this week, we have been building up to the epic launch of our new imprint, Viper Books. We’re so excited to introduce Viper and bring you books with bite: crime, thrillers and other mysterious fiction.
On Thursday 7th November, we hosted an incredible launch party and it was great to see faces new and old and celebrate our great authors.
The launch was hosted by journalist Jake Kerridge, who talked to our authors about their writing. We began with Nicola White; whose A Famished Heart (dubbed “catholic noir” by Nicola’s friend) will be the first Viper publication in February 2020. We then heard from the brilliant David Jackson (The Resident, July 2020), Tina Baker (Call Me Mummy, Feb 2021) and Janice Hallett (The Appeal, Jan 2021). The wonderful Tina Baker, attended the party in sparkling green sequins and a Medusa headdress (a look to die for!). Guests left with Viper goody bags filled with Viper vodka, jelly snakes, bookmarks and proofs.
Huge thanks to everyone who came along and helped us kick off Viper Books with an unforgettable launch party – and congratulations to our brilliant Viper editor Miranda Jewess (who you can follow on Twitter here).
We can’t wait to share the list with you. Visit the Viper Books website to find out about our first five titles, coming in 2020.
Join Viper on Twitter @ViperBooks
Follow Viper on instagram: @viper.books
BUNNY IS ABSOLUTELY NOT COMPLETELY FINE
Meet the antiheroine of 2019: Bunny, an acerbic, mordantly witty, and clinically depressed writer who is sick to the back teeth of – well, everything, really, but especially New Year’s Eve, the holiday of forced fellowship, mandatory fun, and paper hats. But still here she finds herself, at a dinner with a group of particularly irritating friends, and it’s really no wonder that this leads to a pivotal moment that lands her in the psych ward of a prestigious New York hospital.
An unputdownable, at times hilarious, at times heartbreaking novel with a heroine you will fall in love with (see reader reviews such as ‘I adored Bunny’ and ‘I wanted to continue on Bunny’s journey with her’), we want to recommend Rabbits for Food to everyone who’s ever felt like they might be difficult to love.
Rabbits for Food is out on 14th November.
Read an extract below.
WAITING FOR THE DOG
THE DOG IS LATE, AND I’m wearing pajamas made from the same material as Handi Wipes, which is reason enough for me to wish I were dead. I’m expecting this dog to be a beagle, a beagle dressed in an orange dayglow vest the same as the orange dayglow vests worn by suitcase-sniffing beagles at the airport. To expect that the do-gooder dog will be the same breed of dog wearing the same outfit worn by narco-dogs no doubt reveals the limitations of my imagination.
On the opposite wall from where I sit is the Schedule of Activities board. The board is white, and the Activities are written in black marker across a seven-day grid. Seven days, just in case I want to plan ahead, map out my week. Next to the board is the clock, one of those schoolroom-type clocks, which moves time as if through sludge. That’s it. There’s nothing else to look at other than the blue slipper-socks on my feet. Shoes with laces are Not Allowed. Other shoes Not Allowed are shoes with high heels or even kitten heels, as if a kitten heel could do damage, which is why I’m wearing the blue slipper-socks. Slipper-socks with rubber chevrons on the soles. Chevrons are V-shaped, but the V is upside-down. The slipper-socks also come in dung-colored brown.
A partial list of other things Not Allowed includes: pencils, nail clippers, laptops, cell phones, vitamins, mouthwash, and mascara.
It doesn’t take long to grow bored by my slipper-socks, and I turn my attention back to the clock. The second hand stutters, ffffffifty-one, ffffffifty-two. A watched pot never boils. My mother used to say that, that a watched pot never boils. Also, every cloud has a silver lining, tomorrow is another day, and time heals all wounds. Words of comfort that invariably resulted in a spontaneous combustion of rabid adolescent rage. One of the nurses, the tall one, tall and skinny, gangly not graceful—Ella, her name is Ella—walks by, and then as if she’d forgotten something, she pauses, pivots and retraces her steps. “Mind if I join you?” she asks. To sit on the bench, Ella has to fold herself as if her arms and legs were laundry.
In stark contrast to the rest of her, Ella’s head is round like a ball; bigger than a baseball and smaller than a basketball, but that’s the shape. Exactly like a ball. She’s like a stick figure come to life, having stepped out from that ubiquitous Crayola crayon-on-paper drawing, the one with the three stick figures and a tree and a square house with a triangular roof set like a hat at a jaunty angle. From the upper left-hand corner, a giant yellow sun warms this lopsided two-dimensional world. No doubt it’s some standard developmental thing, that most children draw the same crap picture at the same crap-picture stage of life. Except for the prodigies and the children who are already fucked up. With the fucked-up ones you get a different picture, something along the same lines, but with the house on fire or the stick figures missing their heads. The prodigy, as young as the age of four, will draw a split-level house with gray shingles, and in the foreground, beneath a maple tree in autumn, a dog frolics in a pile of leaves. I know this for a fact because my sister, the older one, Nicole, was a prodigy in art although later she did not live up to her potential, assuming there was potential and her talent was not one of those things kids simply outgrow, the way my younger sister, the third of us three girls, was born with allergies to milk and wool among other things, which she outgrew at puberty.
Ella and I sit here on the bench as if the two of us are in this together, as if we are both waiting for the dog, but then Ella says, “You know what, hon? I don’t think the dog is coming today.” Ella calls everyone “hon.” I’m not special, which is one of the things that about kills me from the hurt of it, that I’m not special.
And worse than the hurt of not being someone special is the shame of it, the shame of how much I want that, to be someone special.
A Q&A WITH BINNIE KIRSHENBAUM
Our Senior Marketing Manager Flora Willis interviewed Binnie Kirshenbaum for our newsletter – scroll down to read the Q&A. Sign up to our newsletter here.
Hi Binnie! I’m excited to be quizzing you on Rabbits For Food because I’m in love with this book. Or, more specifically, with the protagonist, Bunny, a whip-smart, black-humoured forty-three-year-old woman who has depression. Why did you decide to write about mental health?
It wasn’t so much a decision as it was inevitability. There’s a genetic strain on my mother’s side of the family, myself included, that predisposes us to bouts of severe depression and the occasional burst of mania. My grandmother was often “tired,” and one of my aunts, who was a professor of rhetoric, went way out of her mind and underwent ECT, which was effective insofar as she returned to sanity. Perfectly fine, no flatline, no memory loss except for her field of study. She couldn’t tell you what a comma was. Also, half my friends carry around their daily meds in throat lozenge tins.
When the novel opens we join Bunny in the psych ward of a hospital, waiting for the Pet Therapy dog. How did you research the workings of psychiatric hospitals?
I did have some first-hand knowledge. Twelve or thirteen years ago, I spent a brief time in a psych ward, but I didn’t want Bunny’s experience to be based all that much on my experience. I spoke with other people I know who’d done a stint in a psych ward about how it was for them. I went online and found that quite a few institutions have websites that are similar to websites for a week at spa. The bulk of my research was about ECT. Online, the data and opinions from the psychiatric community were enthusiastic, asserting new precision and the only possible side effect was short-term memory loss, which would return within a few months. Testimonials were glowing. Then, I spoke with three psychiatrists and a neurologist who were dead-set against it. What took the longest time to find out was how the procedure was performed. I had to go to a medical library for that.
Rabbits for Food is a bittersweet novel, at once heartbreaking and very funny. Why do you think humour works so well in a novel about such serious themes?
If we don’t find a way to laugh, how do we face the day? I don’t mean that we laugh at suffering, but we do laugh at the absurdities and stupidities associated with suffering. Right now, it is the stand-up comics who are the getting us through the daily horrors of Trump and what he has wrought. And so much of what is comedy, has an element of tragedy to it. Why was Charlie Chaplin slipping on a banana peel funny? Why would we laugh at humiliation? Some of the best comedians rise from oppressed peoples. And telling the kind of truth that social grace tells us not to tell is often very funny, which is why Bunny is funny. (She’d hate the rhyme.)
I’ll never forget the pivotal scene: the New Year’s Eve dinner party, when Bunny and her husband, Albie, go to a restaurant with a group of intensely irritating friends. Why did you set this scene on New Year’s Eve?
I’ve always thought that the way New Year’s Eve is celebrated guarantees a let down. The pressure is on to have fun. Fun, when it’s demanded of us, results in our faking fun, which is depressing. It’s like one of those holiday cruise ships. New Year’s Eve can’t live up to the hype of itself. Restaurants are too crowded. People drink too much, they do things they regret in the morning, and there is vomit on the street. Every New Year’s Eve party I ever went to, come midnight, invariably I’d be standing next to the last person in the world I’d ever want to kiss. It’s been a long time since I last went out on New Year’s Eve.
Without giving anything away, you write a perfectly pitched sub-plot about Bunny’s partner, Albie. Was it important to you to try and tell the story of those close to someone with a mental illness?
Mental illness, like other kinds of pain—a toothache, for example—will often bring about a kind of narcissism because it is difficult, if not impossible, to focus on anything but the pain. As a result, those who are close to the mentally ill person will often suffer more than the mentally ill person does. Despite how Bunny can be difficult and unpleasant under the best of circumstances and, of course, at this time in her life she’s far more difficult and unpleasant, I wanted Albie to sincerely love her. But I didn’t want him to be a martyr or pitiful. To do that, I had to give him a life separate from Bunny. It allowed him to cope, but it didn’t make him love her any less.
This week we’re celebrating the launch of our new crime imprint, Viper Books. Every day this week we’ll be sharing the first chapter of a new book on the list: starting with Nicola White’s A Famished Heart, which you can read below.
Join us on Twitter: @ViperBooks
A FAMISHED HEART
Nicola White
Her head was bowed, and the hands braced on the chair arms were not like hands at all, but the dry dark claws of a bird…
The Macnamara sisters hadn’t been seen for months before anyone noticed. It was Father Timoney who finally broke down the door, who saw what had become of them. Berenice was sitting in her armchair, surrounded by religious tracts. Rosaleen had crawled under her own bed, her face frozen in terror. Both had starved themselves to death.
Francesca Macnamara returns to Dublin after decades in the US, to find her family in ruins. Meanwhile, Detectives Vincent Swan and Gina Considine are convinced that there is more to the deaths than suicide. Because what little evidence there is, shows that someone was watching the sisters die…
Poignant and haunting, A Famished Heart is the first in a powerful new trilogy set in 1980’s Dublin, exploring the power of the Catholic Church and the powerlessness of unmarried women.
Read an extract below.
Follow Nicola White on Twitter
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Chapter 3
Vincent Swan took the call from Deerfield Garda Station, wrote down the relevant address and scanned the office for someone to bring with him. Young Colin Rooney was eating a sandwich with his mouth open and reading the sports pages, a tempting target.
‘I’ve got a car signed out.’
He swivelled towards her voice. Detective Garda Gina Considine was already getting up from her desk. One week in the unit and keen as a razor.
‘Okay so.’
She swung her jacket off the back of her chair and jangled a set of car keys at him.
‘You can drive,’ said Swan.
‘Taking your life in your hands there,’ commented Ownie Hannigan from his den in the corner, half hidden by a buttress of filing cabinets and a fug of smoke. Swan ignored him, but some of the other men obliged with rote chuckles.
They headed out from Garda Headquarters onto the North Circular. The radio was playing some dreadful chirpy pop, so he twisted the knob and hit RTE1. A woman with a drawling voice was discussing food. The third time she said luscious, he hit the button.
Gina Considine side-eyed him. ‘Can I ask what we’re going to?’
‘An old woman, dead in her home. Found by her priest.’
He looked out of the side window. They were waiting at lights near Phibsborough Cross, entering his home turf, and his eyes automatically sought out his father’s old shop. The sign on the gable wall was still visible – just – the white letters faint on the red bricks now.
HARRY SWAN
FINE FURNISHINGS
Considine was following his line of sight. ‘He’s got the same name as you. A relative?’
‘I can see why you were promoted to the detective unit.’ She looked uncertain how to respond.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to sound sarcastic.’
The lights changed and she drove on, obeying his directions wordlessly. It was the thought of his father made him irritable. He had been a spectacularly bad businessman – filled his shop with gilt froufrou when the style was sleek and modern, then changed to sleek and modern when the middle classes were all for stripped dressers and Victoriana. His father never listened to anyone’s advice, least of all Swan’s mother. And now he was two years dead and his mother still heartbroken for the old bastard.
They passed by the end of his street and pulled onto the busy road towards Glasnevin. When he spotted the ugly church of St Alphonsus coming up on the far side, he pointed to a slip road and Considine turned off.
‘It should be around here.’
This week we’re celebrating the launch of our new crime imprint, Viper Books. Every day this week we’ll be sharing the first chapter of a new book on the list. Today we introduce Ren Richards’ The Broken Ones.
Join us on Twitter: @ViperBooks
THE BROKEN ONES
Ren Richards
When her child was taken what did she really see?
A bestselling true crime writer, Nell Way tells other people’s stories. But there is one story Nell won’t tell. Ten years ago and with a different name, she was a teenage mother with a four-year-old she found desperately hard to love. Then the little girl disappeared, and Nell has never shaken off the shadow of suspicion.
As she begins to interview the subject of her next book – a woman convicted of murdering her twin sister – it becomes clear that someone has uncovered her true identity. And they know that Nell didn’t tell the truth about the day her daughter disappeared…
Who do you turn to when you’re not sure if you love your child? And when they’re taken, will anyone believe you’re innocent?
Follow Ren Richards on Twitter
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1
NOW
Murderers are human too. That’s the part people forget. Look at this photo of the Widow Thompson. She is a middle-aged woman with grey hair and a disoriented sort of smile. Her eyes are distant. She looks ashen and strange, but objectively human. She has teeth, cheekbones, clavicles that peek out from the collar of her olive-coloured dress.
Now you find out this woman is a murderer. Suddenly the eyes are not human. The smile is evil, depraved. The skin is not covering a skull and bones and muscle. Something has changed, and you tell yourself that you had already suspected this. You’ll turn to the person next to you and say, ‘I knew it. I knew something was off.’
There is no bone, no piece of connective tissue or strand of DNA that separates a church mom from a woman who drowns all eight of her children in a bathtub. And that’s what the woman in this photo has done. She started with the oldest, who was eleven. Eleven is bigger than one or three or even nine. An eleven year-old can weigh about a ninety pounds and put up a good fight, rake their nails across their mother’s face, rip the towel rack from the wall trying to climb out of the shallow porcelain grave. Pieces of drywall and fractured tiles turned the water grey.
But the Widow Thompson was stronger. Not by much, but enough to get the job done. The other children were smaller, easier. The thirteen-month-old was last. She took no effort at all. As her mother carried her past the bodies of her siblings – all laid out in a silent row on the bedroom floor – she stared curiously, wondering why none of them looked up to pay her any attention.
Babies are easy to kill. That’s what the Widow Thompson said in her interview with police. She smiled and said that it was peaceful. Her older children hadn’t known that this was the right thing to do, but the baby had. She just slipped underwater and closed her eyes.
You only have a photo of the woman, though. You don’t have the forensics photo of the baby in the tub; you just have to take the woman’s word for it, and you’d be stupid to believe it happened like she said. But don’t kid yourself. The hands she used to do it were shaped just like yours.
CTRL + S, and the story was saved to Nell’s hard drive. The Widow Thompson would be her second true crime novel, the most controversial, and as of yet, the most lucrative.
It was five minutes to midnight. She sat in the dark with the blue glow of the screen lighting up her face. The tea in her mug had gone cold. The cream was curdled and pungent, like metal in the air.
She opened an email to her agent, attached the
file and hit send, meeting her deadline with four minutes to spare. Sebastian slept in the bed beside her, turned away, the muscles of his back creating lines in his shirt.
‘Hey,’ Nell whispered, and leaned over to kiss his ear. The laptop slid and she grasped it before it slid off the bed. Bas groaned and shifted.
‘I finished it,’ she said.
Bas turned to face her, and his eyes opened, heavy-lidded. ‘Just now?’
She closed the laptop with a resolute slam. ‘Just now.’
He coiled his arms around her and pulled her to his chest. ‘What’s it like in your head?’ He tucked her hair behind her shoulder. ‘All those fucked-up stories floating around all the time.’
‘They’re not my stories,’ she said. ‘I’m just reporting the facts.’
He buried his face in the curl of her neck. He smelled so good, like laundry fresh from the dryer. It was the consistency of his presence – his smell, his touch, even the soured breath from hours of sleep – that Nell loved the most. Consistency was a foreign country whose maps eluded her. Two years of sleeping beside this man and she was still waiting for the morning she would wake up and find him gone.
It was a thought that left her fearful of the dark, as though he would disappear in the blackness between the city lights that dotted the windows. But every morning he was exactly where she’d left him, and the longer he stayed, the more their lives braided together. She could almost believe that he was permanent. This frightened her more than anything the Widow Thompson had done. Sebastian’s eyes were closed now. He tightened his hold on her, and her body rose and fell with the waves of his breathing.
‘How does it end?’ he asked.
‘The Widow Thompson’s mug shot,’ Nell said.
‘That’s what made me want to take this story. It was just so – sad.’
‘Yeah. Eight kids drowning in a tub because their mother is one Froot Loop away from a full bowl is pretty sad,’ Bas snorted.
‘I didn’t write a book about the kids,’ Nell said. ‘We already know their story. They were all over the news. Little Stacie in her ballet photos and Caleb getting baptised in his tuxedo with the sleeves that are too big for him.’
Indeed, there had been a dozen two hour specials in the three years since the crime had
occurred. The story had been interred in the endless tomb of the world’s tragedies, only to be ripped open anew by the Widow Thompson’s appeal case.
Society had seen fit to let her rot in the New York state pen on death row, but a women’s rights group successfully won an appeal to have her transferred to a mental healthcare facility two months ago. It sparked outrage, and the news was plastered with the photos of her dead children, forever frozen in time. Blowing out birthday candles and holding up Fourth of July sparklers and – in a tragic bit of irony – splashing each other in the public pool.
But nobody talked about the Widow Thompson. Nobody talked about the husband who died when his tractor-trailer veered off the road after a forty eight-hour shift to provide for the children he’d insisted they conceive in bulk. Nobody talked about the postpartum depression the Widow Thompson had been displaying for a good five years before the crime, ever since the birth of her twins, Spencer and Lillian.
This week we’re celebrating the launch of our new crime imprint, Viper Books. Every day this week we’ll be sharing the first chapter of a new book on the list. Today we introduce Bitter Wsh Road by Garry Disher.
Join us on Twitter: @ViperBooks
Bitter Wash Road
Garry Disher
Hirsch is a whistle-blower. Formerly a promising metropolitan detective, now hated and despised, he’s been exiled to a one-cop station in South Australia’s wheatbelt. Threats. Pistol cartridge in the mailbox.
So when he heads up Bitter Wash Road to investigate gunfire and finds himself cut off without backup, there are two possibilities. Either he’s found the fugitive killers thought to be in the area. Or his ‘backup’ is about to put a bullet in him.
He’s wrong on both counts. But when the next call-out takes him to the body of a sixteen-year-old girl, his investigation has disturbing echoes of the past he’s trying to leave behind…
Keep up with Viper Books
1
On a Monday morning in September, three weeks into the job, the new cop at Tiverton took a call from his sergeant: shots fired on Bitter Wash Road.
‘Know it?’
‘Vaguely, Sarge,’ Hirsch said.
‘Vaguely. You been sitting on your arse for three weeks, or
have you been poking around like I asked?’
‘Poking around, Sarge.’
‘You can cover a lot of ground in that time.’
‘Sarge.’
‘I told you, didn’t I, no dropkicks?’
‘Loud and clear, Sarge.’
‘No dropkicks on my watch,’ Sergeant Kropp said, ‘and
no smartarses.’
He switched gears, telling Hirsch that a woman motorist had called it in. ‘No name mentioned, tourist on her way to look at the wildflowers. Heard shots when she pulled over to photograph the Tin Hut.’ Kropp paused. ‘You with me, the Tin Hut?’
Hirsch didn’t have a clue. ‘Sarge.’
‘So get your arse out there, let me know what you find.’
‘Sarge.’
‘This is farming country,’ the sergeant said, in case Hirsch hadn’t worked it out yet, ‘the sheep-shaggers like to take pot-shots at rabbits. But you never know.’
Wheat and wool country, in fact, three hours north of Adelaide. Hirsch’s new posting was a single-officer police station in a blink-and-you’d-miss-it town on the Barrier Highway. Tiverton. There were still a few of these little cop shops around the state, the department knowing not to call them one-man stations, not in this day and age, or not within range of a microphone, but it didn’t place female officers in them all the same, citing safety and operational concerns. So, single guys were sent to Tiverton—the wives of married officers would take one look and say no thanks—often, or especially, guys with a stink clinging to them.
Like Hirsch.
The police station was the front room of a small brick house right on the highway, where flies droned and sluggish winds stirred the yellowed community notices. Hirsch lived in the three rooms behind it: bathroom, sitting room with alcove kitchen, bedroom. He also enjoyed a parched front lawn and a narrow driveway for his own aged Nissan and the SA Police fleet vehicle, a four-wheel-drive Toyota HiLux mounted with a rear cage. There was a storeroom at the back, its barred window and reinforced door dating from the good old days before the deaths-in-custody inquiry, when it had been the lockup. For all of these luxurious appointments the department screwed him on the rent.
Hirsch finished the call with Sergeant Kropp, then he located Bitter Wash Road on the wall map, locked up, pinned his mobile number to the front door and backed out of the driveway. He passed the general store first, just along from the police station and opposite the primary school, the playground still and silent, the kids on holiday. Then a couple of old stone houses, the Institute with its weathered cannon and memorial to the dead of the world wars, more houses, two churches, an agricultural supplier, a signpost to the grain dealer’s down a side street . . . and that was Tiverton. No bank, chemist, GP, lawyer, dentist, accountant or high school.
He drove south along the floor of a shallow valley, undulating and partly cultivated hills on his left, a more dramatic and distant range on his right—blue today, scarred here and there by scrubby trees and shadows among erupted rocks, a foretaste of the Flinders Ranges, three hours further north. Following the custom of the locals, Hirsch lifted one finger
from the steering wheel to greet the oncoming cars. Both of them. Nothing else moved, although he was travelling through a land poised for movement. Birds, sitting as if
snipped from tin, watched him from the power lines. Farmhouses crouched mutely behind cypress hedges and farm vehicles sat immobile in paddocks, waiting for him to pass.
Five kilometres south of Tiverton he turned left at the Bitter Wash turnoff, heading east into the hills, and here there was some movement in the world. Stones smacked the chassis. Skinny sheep fled, a dog snarled across a fence line, crows rose untidily from a flattened lizard. The road turned and rose and fell, taking him deeper into hardscrabble country, just inside the rain shadow. He passed a tumbled stone wall dating from the 1880s and a wind farm turbine. Someone had been planting trees against erosion up and down one of the gullies. He remembered to check kilometres travelled since the turnoff, and wondered how far along the track this tin hut was.
He slowed for a dip in the road, water running shallowly across it from last night’s storm, and accelerated uphill, over a peak and around a blind corner. And jammed on the brakes. Slewed to a shuddering halt in a hail of gravel.
A gumtree branch the length of a power pole lay across Bitter Wash Road. Hirsch switched off, his heart hammering. Close shave. Beyond, the road dipped again, bottoming out where a creek in weak, muddy flood had scored a shallow trench in the gravel, then it climbed to another blind corner. And there, in a little cleared area inside the fence and angled alongside a bend in the creek, was Sergeant Kropp’s Tin Hut: corrugated iron walls and roof, mostly rust, and a crooked chimney. On a flat above it he glimpsed trees and the suggestion of a green farmhouse roof.
Hirsch got out. He was reaching to drag the branch off the road when a bullet snapped past his head.
This week we’re celebrating the launch of our new crime imprint, Viper Books. Every day this week we’ll be sharing the first chapter of a new book on the list. Today we are introducing Who We Were by B.M. Carroll.
Join us on Twitter: @ViperBooks
Who We Were
B.M. Carroll
It’s been twenty years but all is not forgiven
Katy is not the shy schoolgirl she once was, and she’s looking forward to showing her classmates who she’s become. Annabel was the queen bee, but her fall from grace changed her life forever. Zach was cruel, but he thinks he’s changed. Robbie was a target. And he never stood a chance.
Their reunion will bring together friends and enemies, many for the first time in decades. But someone is still holding a grudge, and will stop at nothing to reveal their darkest secrets…
A gripping novel about the power of childhood cruelty and how it makes us the adults we become.
Follow B. M. Carroll on Twitter.
Keep up with Viper Books
The lock takes less than a minute, the fourth key a close enough fit, assisted with a few bumps from the handle of a screwdriver. The door pushes open into a hallway with off white tiles laid on the diagonal. Next is an open-plan kitchen and living area, a study nook on the far side of the sofa: small desk, dated laptop, a printout of the invitation sitting atop a neat pile of paperwork.
You are invited to the twenty-year
reunion of the Class of 2000
Deep breath. Don’t get angry. Don’t lose focus. The laptop whirrs to life, its fan sounding inordinately loud in the silent apartment. No password required, stupidly trusting and naive. Insert the USB, click on install, twenty minutes to completion. Be calm. Be thorough. She won’t be home for hours yet. Plenty of time to check her browsing history, her Facebook page and the rest of the paperwork on the desk. Glimpses into the construct of her life, the friends
she holds close, her most secret desires.
Wander into the kitchen, opening and shutting cabinet doors, cataloguing the food she eats, the brand of coffee she prefers. The main bedroom is located down a short corridor. White cotton bedcovers, faux-fur cushions, the book she’s reading – a bestselling thriller –open on the bedside table. Underneath it, another book, larger, sickeningly familiar.
Yearbook of Macquarie High, Class of 2000
Don’t touch it, don’t look at those hateful faces, don’t fall for that fake innocence. Back to the antiquated laptop. Glare at the screen as it reluctantly grinds through the final stages. Pocket the
USB. Switch off the machine. Pause inside the front door, key poised, cap pushed low in case there’s a security camera lurking somewhere. Listen. All clear. Bump, bump, bump goes the screwdriver. It’s happening. Their shallow lives will be blown apart. And they’ll be sorry. Finally.
Name: Annabel Moore (School captain)
What you will be remembered for: Not keeping a straight face when Miss Hicks fell up the stage steps on awards night.
Best memories of high school: Year 11 snow excursion.
Worst memories of high school: Double period maths on Fridays. Torture.
What will you be doing ten years from now: Marine biologist.
The email arrives a couple of days later.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Updated Yearbook
Annabel clicks on it without much thought. That is not strictly true. If she is honest, there is a brief, quite vicious desire to topple Katy Buckley from her self-appointed role as reunion organiser.
The first thing Annabel sees is a grainy, unflattering photo of herself. Directly below there’s text typed in an old-fashioned font.
Name: Annabel Harris (Née Moore)
Highest achievement at school: School captain.
What you do now: Stay-at-home mother.
Highlights of last twenty years: Nothing remarkable. Peaked at school.
Lowlights: Finding out your son smokes dope. Initially not telling your husband.
Deepest fears: That weed is a gateway drug for Daniel.
Her first reaction is horror, to the point where she actually feels sick. Then she recovers herself. This is someone’s idea of a joke. The cruellest, most despicable joke. The kind of thing they’d have done twenty years ago, back when they’d time to waste, unlimited imagination, and the lines between humour and outright nastiness were blurred.
So, who sent this? Someone who knows about their struggles with Daniel, even though Annabel and Jarrod resolved to keep it within the family. Someone who wants the upcoming reunion to have a hint of mystery, and perhaps shock factor?
The photo – one she’s never seen before – is fairly recent. Her hair is in its usual style – layered, blonde, shoulder-length. There are tell-tale lines around her mouth and purple shadows under her eyes: was it taken the morning after a night when she’d lain awake, listening hard to see if Daniel was moving around, sneaking out of the house? There are so many Facebook photos she’s been ‘tagged’ in, so many casual shots in restaurants and other gatherings, who knows where this one came from.
Will everyone else get one of these ‘updates’ in their inbox? Yes, that must be the plan, otherwise there’d be no joke. Annabel can’t fathom who would have the time or energy for something this elaborate. Hardly Katy Buckley. Not imaginative enough. Not cruel enough. Definitely not ballsy enough. Besides, Katy would be up to her eyes compiling the real updated yearbook.
Melissa Andrews? Co-editor of the original yearbook, so maybe possessing a vested interest in the revised one? Melissa and Annabel used to be friends, before everything turned toxic during those last few months of school. Now, as Annabel allows herself to think about Melissa, the jealousy returns. It was never an ordinary jealousy; it was obsessive, powerful, insanely out of proportion. But regardless of how Annabel might feel, then or now, she knows that Melissa wouldn’t be so juvenile as to do something like this. Too busy with her high-flying career.
Zach Latham? Another co-editor. Zach would do anything for a laugh and did have the propensity for cruelty. Is he still the same today? Luke Willis? God, she hasn’t thought about him in years. Whatever became of Luke Willis?
This week we’re celebrating the launch of our new crime imprint, Viper Books. Every day this week we’ll be sharing the first chapter of a new book on the list. Today we are introducing The Resident by David Jackson.
Join us on Twitter: @ViperBooks
The Resident
David Jackson
Thomas Brogan is a serial killer, and he has nowhere left to hide. At least until he finds an abandoned house at the end of a terrace on a quiet street. And when he discovers that he can access three other houses through the attic space, the real fun begins.
Because the one thing that Brogan enjoys even more than killing, is playing games with his victims. And his new neighbours have more than enough dark secrets to make this game his best one yet…
A new gripping and disturbing thriller…
Follow David Jackson on Twitter
Keep up with Viper Books
Monday, June 3. 11.49 PM
They’re here! They’ve come for us!
Not possible. How could they know?
Who cares? They know. What else could this be?
Brogan stared wide-eyed at the flashes of blue light bouncing crazily off the windows of the houses. No sirens, just the lights. They wanted to catch him by surprise.
We have to go. NOW!
Brogan raced back to the dining room. He grabbed his backpack and turned to the couple seated at the table.
‘It’s been a pleasure staying with you,’ he told them. ‘Thank you for your hospitality.’
He didn’t wait for a response. He moved swiftly to the kitchen, slid open the patio door and stepped into the night’s embrace.
He could hear urgent whispers and footsteps in the neighbouring garden to his left. He went right, hopped up onto a wheelie bin, then swung over the fence.
A torch beam sliced through the blackness and picked him out.
‘He’s here!’ yelled a voice. And then: ‘Police! Stay where you are! Down on the ground!’
Brogan knew that the copper was expecting him to either obey or flee. He did neither.
He ran straight at the approaching police officer, who yelped in surprise. Brogan kicked out, slamming his foot into the man’s chest, and sending him hurtling into the wall of the house behind. As the officer rebounded, Brogan drew back his fist. He did not pause to think, This is a policeman, and if I hurt him I will be in deep trouble. He didn’t worry that the man might have a wife or kids. He knew only that the uniform in front of him represented an obstacle to freedom.
And so Brogan let his fist fly, right into his opponent’s throat. Hit it so hard that it seemed the man’s windpipe was crushed against his spine.
As the officer collapsed to the ground, clutching his neck and spluttering, Brogan set off again. The voices were growing louder, closer. A noose was tightening around him.
He scaled the next fence with ease. Then the next, and the one after that. Lights came on. Dogs began barking. At one house, a man in pyjamas came out to see what the commotion was. He took one astonished look at Brogan and scurried back indoors.
Brogan kept going. He was fit and he was strong, and he didn’t worry about consequences. They would catch him one day, he knew that.
But maybe tonight would be his lucky night.
Tuesday, June 4. 1.46 AM
He stayed away from the main roads, knowing that they carried the most risk. But he also knew he couldn’t keep roving through the city’s capillaries for much longer. The police would be out in force, armed with his description and now a grudge for the harm done against a fellow officer.
The problem was where to hide. The Carter house had been perfect. They didn’t get any visitors – hardly any phone calls, for that matter. He was able to keep them company for days. Not that they appreciated it. A lodger like Brogan was the last thing any sane person wanted.
He wondered how the police had cottoned on to his presence. What error had he made?
I think it was the noise. You had that music system turned up really loud, you know.
Yeah, well, there was a good reason for that.
The stutter of helicopter blades yanked him back to the present. He looked skywards and saw the machine hovering overhead.
They’re looking for us.
Yes, yes, I know.
We need to find cover. Once they spot us, it’s over.
I know, damn it! Let me think.
He changed direction, seeking an escape from the centre of police activity. He didn’t know where he was. All the houses looked the same: row after row of small terraced properties, sleeping while swirls of rubbish danced on the pavement in front of them. The occasional shuttered pub or corner shop. Graffiti on the walls.
And then he saw it.
The abandoned end house, its windows and doors boarded up as if to reassure Brogan that it was willing to turn a blind eye and say nothing.
Brogan crossed the street and entered the alleyway adjoining the house. He scanned the area to make sure nobody was observing him from a window, then he leaped, clamped his hands onto the top of the wall, and pulled himself up.
He dropped down into a yard that had been concreted over many years ago. Now the surface was marbled with cracks, and waist-high weeds had shouldered their way up through them.
He made his way to the back door of the house and studied it in the weak moonlight. The boards covering it were made of plywood that had been screwed to the frame.
He slipped off his backpack and felt around inside. He had items in here that most people would never dream of toting around with them. He rejected a crowbar as being too noisy, and instead brought out a screwdriver. He spent the next few minutes carefully unscrewing the board covering the lower half of the door, dropping each screw into his pocket in case anyone should search the area. He liked to be thorough.
When he moved the board aside, he saw that the door itself looked sturdy enough, but that its lock was cheap and primitive. He took out his set of picks and had the door open in no time.
He left the upper boards in place, and ducked under them to enter the house. When he was inside, he pulled the lowermost board back into position and closed the door.
The darkness was total. Brogan slipped his hand once more into his pack, and pulled out his torch. He flicked it on and played its light over the door. He saw that it had hefty bolts at the top and bottom, and he slid both into place.
He turned, and saw that he was in a bare kitchen. There were no appliances here now. Just a sink, a few battered units, and a single wooden chair. He tried the light switch, but nothing happened. No surprise there. No gas either, probably. But what about water?
He walked to the sink and turned on both taps. Nothing, not even a single explosive spurt.
He searched the cupboards and drawers, and found some scouring pads, a half-empty bottle of bleach, a plastic jug with a crack running down its side, a rusty can-opener and a tin of nails and screws.
Great. All the things a man could ever want.
He found the stopcock beneath the sink, and tried opening it up, but his efforts were in vain. The water had obviously been disconnected at the mains in the street.
He did a quick survey of the rest of the house. He found a living room, dining room, bathroom, and two bedrooms. The only thing to get excited about was an old mattress left on one of the bedroom floors. Somewhere he could get some sleep. He suddenly realised how exhausted he was.
You can’t sleep yet.
Why not?
Your arms. Look at your arms.
Brogan rolled back his sleeves, then sighed.
He headed back downstairs. In the kitchen he turned off his torch, then opened the back door and moved away the board so he could clamber outside.
The air smelled sweet. In the distance he could hear the helicopter hunting for him. He would be safe here for a while. The danger would come when he needed to go in search of food and drink.
He followed the wall to the rear corner of the house. There was a rainwater barrel here – he had noticed it when he arrived. He leaned over and peered inside. The disc of the pale moon stared back at him from the still surface of the water. He doubted it would be safe to drink: the stagnant smell told him that much. But that wasn’t why he had come out here.
He plunged his arms into the water. Dark tendrils curled away from his flesh and swirled across the face of the moon as he washed off the blood of the couple he had murdered.
Senior commissioning editor Miranda Jewess will launch a new crime imprint, Viper, in November with 20 titles for its inaugural year.
Viper will launch with a party in central London on 7th November, with Viper’s first novel, a “haunting police procedural”, A Famished Heart, by Irish author Nicola White, to be published in February 2020.
The list currently stands at 20 titles featuring a mix of debut authors, such as NPR senior editor Vikki Valentine writing under her pen name V L Valentine with The Plague Letters, and established names, such as David Jackson. His standalone thriller, The Resident, follows a serial killer on the run as he hides out in an abandoned house, only to realise he can access all the other houses on the terrace through the attic space, and begins to play deadly games. Viper will publish in July 2020.
The former acquisitions and managing editor at Titan Books joined the company as senior commissioning editor for Serpent’s Tail Crime in February to commission titles across the crime, thriller, and suspense genres.
Explaining the imprint’s name, Jewess said: “We wanted a name that had a strong link to Serpent’s Tail, but also hints at what the list is all about. It’s young, punchy, and as you’d expect, has a pretty high body count.”
Building on Serpent’s Tail’s history of crime fiction, Jewess added: “Viper is all about publishing new crime and thriller fiction, but our parameters aren’t strict. Really I just love books that have a brilliant mystery at their heart. Whether that’s a psychological thriller, a police procedural, historical crime, gothic whodunnit, or a high-concept genre crossover.”
Follow @mirandajewess on Twitter – and stand by for Viper Books on social.
Here at Serpent’s Tail, we are proud of publishing books that we think matter, books that push boundaries, books that engage the reader and challenge them as well. We are also proud of our diverse catalogue and to celebrate Black History Month, we want to shine the spotlight on black authors we have published over the last year.
Follow us on Twitter @serpentstail and let us know what you’re reading for #blackhistorymonth
There Will Be No Miracles Here by Casey Gerald
2019 began with a memoir on race, sexuality and masculinity in the 21st century. Gerald takes us on a moving journey that unravels the promise of prosperity and success that America was built on. Growing up gay in an ordinary black neighbourhood in Dallas, his parents struggling with mental health problems and addiction, Casey finds himself on a remarkable path to a prestigious Ivy League college, to the inner sanctums of power on Wall Street and in Washington DC. But even as he attains everything the American Dream promised him, Casey comes to see that salvation stories like his own are part of the plan to keep others from rising. Intense, incantatory, shot through with sly humour and quiet fury, There Will Be No Miracles Here is an extraordinary memoir that forces us to judge our society not on those who rise highest, but on those left behind along the way.
Embrace your raw, strange magic with Casey Gerald:
Follow Casey on Twitter: @CaseyGerald
Praise for There Will Be No Miracles Here
‘Remarkable on every level … a beautiful chronicle of a life as yet unfinished … a shining and sincere miracle of a book’
NPR
‘Searing . . . rendered in vivid, painful, and regularly funny reminiscence. But more than anything else, this bildungsroman is a wry document of American class strata.’
O, The Oprah Magazine
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018 and winner of The Scotiabank Giller Prize 2018, Washington Black is an incredible epic inspired by a true story. Washington Black, an 11-year old field slave, finds himself selected as a personal servant for one of the two English brothers who have taken helm of the sugar plantation. The eccentric Christopher ‘Titch’ Wilde is a naturalist, explorer, scientist, inventor and abolitionist, whose single-minded pursuit of the perfect aerial machine mystifies all around him.
Titch’s idealistic plans are soon shattered and Washington finds himself in mortal danger. They escape together, but then Titch disappears and Washington must make his way alone, following the promise of freedom further than he ever dreamed possible.
ESCAPE IS ONLY THE BEGINNING
Praise for Washington Black
‘A masterpiece’ Attica Locke
‘Destined to become a future classic … that rare book that should appeal to every kind of reader’ Guardian
A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley
A Lucky Man uncovers the inner lives of black men and boys and is an expansive fiction debut from a major new voice. In the nine unforgettable stories, Jamel Brinkley explores the unseen tenderness of black men and boys: the struggle to love and be loved, the invisible ties of family and friendship, and the inescapable forces of race, class and masculinity. A teen intent on proving himself a man at an all-night rave is preoccupied by watching out for his impressionable younger brother. A pair of young men who follow two girls home from a party face the uncomfortable truth of their desires. An imaginative boy from the inner city goes swimming in the suburbs, and faces the effects of privilege in ways he can barely grasp. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with their painful family history.
Follow Jamel on Twitter: @jamelbrinkley
Praise for A Lucky Man
‘Sensuous, sensual, sharply observed stories. A really striking debut.’ Adam O’Riordan
‘Jamel Brinkley’s stories tell of absence and abandonment, always edged with pain and beauty … a magnificent debut’
Laila Lalami
‘Outstanding…smart and moving’ Curtis Sittenfield
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman
Revered by literary icons such as Carmen Maria Machado and Maggie Nelson, Hartman resurrects the forgotten histories of black women around the turn of the century and weaves an intricate and intimate account of their lives.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, black women in the US were carving out new ways of living. The first generations born after emancipation, their struggle was to live as if they really were free. Their defeats were bitter, but their triumphs became the blueprint for a world that was waiting to be born. These women refused to labour like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Wrestling with the question of freedom, they invented forms of love and solidarity outside convention and law. These were the pioneers of free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer identities, and single motherhood – all deemed scandalous, even pathological, at the dawn of the twentieth century, though they set the pattern for the world to come.
Revolution in a minor key: how young black women invented freedom
Follow Saidiya on Twitter: @sojournerlife
Praise for Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
‘Ambitious, original… a beautiful experiment in its own right’ Maggie Nelson
‘A startling, dazzling act of resurrection’ Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
‘Exhilarating….A rich resurrection of a forgotten history’ The New York Times
Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke
Nine-year-old Levi King knew he should have left for home sooner; instead he found himself all alone, adrift on the vastness of Caddo Lake. A sudden noise – and all goes dark. Ranger Darren Matthews is trying to emerge from another kind of darkness; his career and reputation lie in the hands of his mother, who’s never exactly had his best interests at heart. Now she holds the key to his freedom, and she’s not above a little blackmail to press her advantage. An unlikely possibility of rescue arrives in the form of a case down Highway 59, in a small lakeside town. With Texas already suffering a new wave of racial violence in the wake of the election of Donald Trump, a black man is a suspect in the possible murder of a missing white boy: the son of an Aryan Brotherhood captain.
In deep country where the rule of law only goes so far, Darren has to battle centuries-old prejudices as he races to save not only Levi King, but himself.
In a divided world, must we forgive the past before mending the present?
Follow Attica on Twitter: @atticalocke
Praise for Heaven, My Home
‘One of America’s finest crime novelists … a beautifully wrought mystery and an incisive portrait of the American South in the age of Trump.’ – The Daily Mail
‘A tightly plotted crime novel centring on the disappearance of a child, and a blistering look at race in Donald Trump’s America.’ – iPaper
‘The most celebrated African-American writer of crime fiction. Although her books are about the black experience in the US, they are universal in scope … a consummate storyteller.’ – Financial Times
Follow us on Twitter @serpentstail and let us know what you’re reading for #blackhistorymonth
The Portico Prize Longlist of 17 books explores the myriad themes of identity, belonging, gender, class and the meaning of place – all connected by the spirit of the North.
This year’s list includes six debut novels and ten independent publishers, and spans fiction, creative non-fiction, memoir, poetry, place writing, biography, a graphic history and travel writing.
Angela Steidele’s brilliant work of non-fiction, Gentleman Jack, recreates the life of Anne Lister, history’s first modern lesbian who inspired the television series Gentleman Jack.
Anne Lister’s journals were so shocking that the first person to crack their secret code hid them behind a fake panel in his ancestral home. Anne Lister was a Regency landowner, an intrepid world traveller … and an unabashed lover of other women.
In this bold new biography, prizewinning author Angela Steidele uses the diaries to create a portrait of Anne Lister as we’ve never seen her before: a woman in some ways very much of her time and in others far ahead of it. Anne Lister recorded everything from the most intimate details of her numerous liaisons through to her plans to make her fortune by exploiting the coal seams under her family estate in Halifax and her reaction to the Peterloo massacre. She conducted a love life of labyrinthine complexity, all while searching for a girlfriend who could provide her with both financial security and true love.
Buy your copy from Amazon, Waterstones or Hive
In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman resurrects the forgotten histories of black women around the turn of the century and weaves an intricate and intimate account of their lives.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, black women in the US were carving out new ways of living. The first generations born after emancipation, their struggle was to live as if they really were free. Their defeats were bitter, but their triumphs became the blueprint for a world that was waiting to be born.
These women refused to labour like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Wrestling with the question of freedom, they invented forms of love and solidarity outside convention and law. These were the pioneers of free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer identities, and single motherhood – all deemed scandalous, even pathological, at the dawn of the twentieth century, though they set the pattern for the world to come.
Read an extract below.
Follow @sojournerlife on Twitter
Buy your copy from Waterstones, Amazon or your local bookshop
An Intimate History of Slavery and Freedom
Yet despite the not-quite-polished picture the black, but comely, small-town girl presented, Mattie was determined to be more than nothing
It was still too early for the whores, sissies, and toughs who plied their trade at the docks. Families gathered awaiting daughters and brothers and cousins; thugs and gangsters lurked at the outskirts of the crowd on the lookout for naive young women in search of direction or in need of help with a heavy piece of luggage. When Mattie Nelson arrived in New York City, she was barely a woman at fifteen. She was a tall, thin, dark-skinned girl, the kind only a father would have ever described as lovely, and the kind white people labeled a Negress to make apparent their contempt and scorn. It would be a decade before the thick hair tamed in braids and pinned in a bun on the top of her head, prominent cheekbones, almond- shaped eyes, and wide full lips would be compared to the beauty of an African mask. Even when dressed in her Sunday best, Mattie was decidedly unsophisticated. Yet despite the not- quite- polished picture the black, but comely, small- town girl presented, Mattie was determined to be more than nothing.
She too would fall prey to the pleasures and dangers of the city while trying to make a feast of its meagre opportunities
It was hard for Mattie to make a distinction between the city and freedom itself. Like those provincials and fools whom Paul Laurence Dunbar derided in The Sport of the Gods as intoxicated by “the subtle and insidious wine” of the streets, who translated the Bowery into romance, made Broadway into lyric, and Central Park into a pastoral, and thereby failed to read the city as it really was, or apprehend it in a mode commensurate with its dangers, or properly adjust to its rhythms and demands, Mattie, looking past the cold facts and the risks, mistook the city for a place where she might thrive. “The real fever of love” would take hold of her, and the streets and the dance halls did become her best friends. All the sentimental causes for this rush and flight— the freedom to move, the want of liberty, the hunger for more and better, and the need of breathing room— explained her presence in New York. She too would fall prey to the pleasures and dangers of the city while trying to make a feast of its meagre opportunities.
None of the factories, shops, or offices would hire colored girls, especially girls as dark as Mattie. Housework and laundry were her only options. It is hard to say whether it was the disappointment at the lack of opportunity or the assault of the coldest winter she had ever experienced that landed her in bed, sick for more than a month, only a few weeks after she had arrived. When Mattie recovered her strength, she found a position as a domestic at a boarding house with twenty-three rooms where she was the sole maid. Washing, cleaning rooms, making beds, and trudging up and down the five flights of stairs in the boarding house wore her out. She hated the drudgery and boredom. But her mother said if she wasn’t going to school, she had to work. Most nights, she fell into bed exhausted, too tired to think about going to the moving pictures or the dance hall. When she wasn’t tired, she was lonely. The evenings were long and dull and not at all as she had imagined New York. After five weeks she quit the boarding house and found a new job at a Chinese laundry in Bayonne, New Jersey, which was different, but no better.
The days were still long and exhausting, but now spent doubled over, pressing clothes. Few white girls were willing to work for the Chinese. The sexual panic about the dangers of Chinese men reached a new height after the body of a young white woman was found in the trunk of a Chinatown bachelor. The daily papers fed the hysteria and fueled the idea of the yellow peril by regularly reporting stories of unsuspecting girls lured into opium dens and turned into drug- addled mistresses, or seduced by lonely bachelors at taxidance halls, or murdered by their lovers. The queer arrangements of Chinatown, the all-male households, were the result of immigration statutes that restricted the entry of Chinese women, and, as a consequence, the brothel or another man’s embrace were the most likely opportunities for intimacy, unless one looked for love across the color line. For Mattie, the Chinese laundry was just another job. Unlike black washerwomen who resented the washee washee men because they competed for the same clients, Mattie didn’t care. The job was just a way station until something better became available.
Follow @sojournerlife and @serpentstail
Buy your copy from Waterstones, Amazon, or Serpent’s Tail
‘An extraordinarily good book’ Philippa Perry
‘A riveting story’ Ottessa Moshfegh
‘Haunting, original, intelligent’ Tessa Hadley
‘Powerful and thought-provoking’ Claire Fuller
‘It has remained with me in a way few other books have ever done’ Sarah Perry
The list of accolades goes on for Say Say Say, the acclaimed debut from Lila Savage. Say Say Say explores the relationship between Ella, a failed artist turned care worker; Jill, her new client; and Jill’s husband Bryn.
Senior press officer Drew Jerrison interviews Lila for our newsletter.
You worked for many years as a caregiver. What kind of work did you do and what drew you to the profession?
I worked as a companion for elderly people, many of whom suffered from memory loss. Usually my role was to help them stay in their homes a little longer as they lost independence over time. I helped with things like bathing and grooming and cooking and cleaning depending on the needs of the individual. I was drawn to the work in part because I have always had an affinity for older people and in part because it was best-paying job I was qualified for when I dropped out of graduate school.
Did you set out to write a novel on caregiving and the kinds of experiences you had?
I did. Once I had the idea for the novel it became a way to honor the work I had been doing and the many people I had cared for. I poured everything I thought and felt about caregiving work into the novel.
In Say Say Say it becomes clear that Ella finds it tricky sticking to boundaries that separate the professional from the personal. In your opinion, are caregivers fully prepared for the emotional as well as physical demands of a role?
I can’t speak to the experiences of most caregivers as I wasn’t trained other than helping my grandmother care for my grandfather when he had Alzheimer’s. That experience prepared me somewhat at least in terms of what to expect from the illness but I had to learn about professional boundaries on the job.
The reviews for Say Say Say have been phenomenal. Were you expecting such a response?
The reviews have mostly been lovely. I didn’t really come into this with expectations—when I started Say Say Say six years ago I wasn’t even thinking about publishing it, I just had a story to tell.
Are there other writers whose work you admire and has inspired your own?
The works of Alan Hollinghurst, Audre Lorde and Michelle Tea have each inspired me in important ways. Also my friend the poet Essy Stone’s work continually inspires me. Her first book, What It Done to Us, beautifully captures the experience of growing up working-class and queer in Evangelical Appalachia. Ottessa Moshfegh is another friend whose work I deeply admire—particularly her novella McGlue, a raw and moving story about alcoholism and much more.
Say Say Say is out now. Buy your copy from:
Waterstones
Hive
Amazon
What kind of person keeps a man underground for seven years? And who would agree to be part of such an experiment?
The year is 1792 and Herbert Powyss is set on making his name as a scientist by studying the effects of prolonged solitude on another human being. He fills three rooms beneath Moreham House with books, paintings and even a pianoforte, then puts out an advertisement with a substantial reward.
The only man desperate enough to apply is John Warlow, a semi-literate farm labourer. Cut off from nature and the turning of the seasons, Warlow soon begins losing his grip on sanity. Above ground, Powyss finds yet another distraction from his greenhouse in the form of Warlow’s wife Hannah. Does she return his feelings, or is she just afraid of his power over her family’s lives?
Meanwhile, the servants are brewing up a rebellion inspired by recent news from across the Channel. Powyss may have set events in motion, but he is powerless to prevent their explosive and devastating conclusion.
Elegantly told and utterly immersive, we can’t wait to share this incredible novel with you.
Read the opening below.
Follow @alixnathan on Twitter
See all the action from our Warlow Experiment book drop
A Reward of £50 a year for life is offered to any man who will undertake to live for 7 years underground without seeing a human face: to let his toe and fingernails grow during the whole of his confinement, together with his beard. Commodious apartments are provided with cold bath, chamber organ, as many books as the occupier shall desire. Provisions will be served from Mr Powyss’s table. Every convenience desired will be provided.
– Herbert Powyss, Moreham House, Herefordshire
January, 1793
CHAPTER ONE
Down and down. He sniffs dank air, listens to the man.Powyss.
‘I’m providing plenty of fuel and kindling, Warlow. You’ll have four baskets of wood a day and a scuttle of sea coal. They’ll come down in the morning. There’s a tinderbox, oil lamps, boxes of candles in that cupboard over there. The jar of lamp oil will be refilled each week, but that’ll depend on your use of it. Send a note if you need more.
‘I’ve tried out everything myself and it all works perfectly. Samuel, get a fire going for Warlow.’
‘I makes my own fire!’
‘Yes, of course, of course. But let’s warm the place while I’m showing you round.’
White cloth. Fork, spoon. Them’s silver. Wine glass! Chair legs like bent knees; never sat on one of them. Look at it! Candlesticks all shone up. Brass. Pictures.
Who’s that in the mirror? Me is it? Him?
‘Three meals a day, as I said. When Jenkins carves at table he’ll dole out a serving for you and send it down by lift. I’m rather pleased with this. Over here. Look: you open it up and inside are two shelves. It’s just a dumb waiter table but without legs and fixed to a pulley. Like hauling sacks up into the barn.
‘Don’t look dumbfounded, Warlow! It’s quite big enough for trays, strong enough for the fuel box. Has to come a long way down but with covers the food should remain hot. Pull the cord to send back empty dishes. Ring the bell first to alert them in the kitchen.’
Powyss moves to the other side of the room. He follows, doglike. ‘Here’s the organ.’
Organ?
Powyss opens the doors of a cupboard.
Not a cupboard. Metal pipes stand in order. Big ones, little ones. Powyss lifts the lid on the keys. His fingers are thin, very clean. What’s him want me to do now?
‘The case of this chamber organ is walnut. Beautifully made. I hope it will amuse you, Warlow. It’s a good one; I tried several and this was certainly the best. While you play you pump with your feet to keep the air going through the pipes. Not too heavily. You don’t want to crack the underboard.’
He sits. Feet up and down, treading. It wheezes like an old woman.
‘See?’ He plays a tune, humming with it. ‘The conquering hero! That’ll keep you in the right mood.’
‘Couldn’t never do that.’
‘Mm. Well, you can sing, can’t you? You could pick out the notes of a tune with one finger.’ I sings in the Dog. The others’d laugh at this! Looks away, sheepish.
‘Of course I didn’t know who would take up the offer. There’s a whole folder of music: more Handel, hymns, J.C. Bach. But no matter.
‘Now, come this way. This little room’s the bathroom. Water comes into the bath from the cistern. Turn the tap.’
‘Bath? Sir?’
‘I know there’ll be no one to see you, but you’ll want to wash yourself. Even without grime from fields and horses and so on. Your beard and hair will grow long. Remember? No cutting. There are no scissors, no knives. You couldn’t cut your own hair anyway, could you?’ Gabble, gabble. Him’s gabblin like a goose can’t stop. Not drunk though. Don’t get drunk not him.
Powyss looks him up and down. ‘Hmm. You may find the bathtub a tight fit, Warlow. But look, here’s the soap, Military Cake, nothing too perfumed. Toothbrush, powder. When you need replenishments you must ask. Do that by writing a note, then ring the bell and send it up. The water’s cold of course. At one time that was thought to be very good for the health, but the bath’s not so far from the fire. The cistern’s over there to one side. Keep an eye on it, please.’
They wander back. Fire’s blazing merrily.
‘Send up your dirty linen. Send up your pot from the close-stool.’
Pot! Close-stool! He looks down. Sees his feet, his great clogs. Powyss’s leather shoes. Small for a man.
‘What work’ll I do, sir?’
‘Living here will be your work. Living here for seven years. For the sake of knowledge, of science: to see how you fare without human society. Your name will become known, Warlow! You’ll become famous.
‘Think of hermits who choose to live on their own for the rest of their lives, let alone seven years. Still, hermits spend their days in prayer and I’m not employing you to do that.’ He breaks off.
‘Do you believe in God, Warlow?’
‘I goes to church Christmastide.’
‘Well, never mind, I’m not quizzing you. Rarely go myself. I’ve put a Bible here among the books, though. That could occupy you for seven years at least!’ He laughs, uneasy-like. Wish him’d go, let me get on with it.
‘Keep the place tidy and swept, won’t you. There are brooms, everything you need of that nature. Wind the clock every eighth day and note the date or you’ll lose track of time. This is the date hand. See, it shows which day of the month it is. If the chimes get on your nerves stop winding that side.’ Can’t remember all that. ‘Read the books and ask for any others you fancy. I’ve chosen them carefully. But I have a large library; you can ask for anything you like.’
‘Never read a book.’
‘Blessed is he that readeth! And now you’ll have the time to do it. You can read, can’t you? You said you could. And write? Of course you can, you signed the contract. There are pens, ink, paper and a journal. See, here’s the first, 1793. Please keep the journal. I’ll send a new one each year. Keeping it will help you and be crucial for me when I write everything up to send to the Royal Society.’
‘Journal, what is that, Mr Powyss, sir?’
‘You write in it what you do each day. First you write the date, then what has happened that day or you write what you’re thinking. Nothing very difficult. It’s a good thing you had some schooling.’
‘It were long years afore.’
‘It’ll all come back to you, I’m sure.’
Powyss shakes his hand. Him’s had enough too.
‘Good luck, Warlow! Don’t forget, your wife and children are taken care of. You’ll do it! We meet again in 1800.’
He smiles. Goes off in his fine black velvet breeches and coat. Locks the door. Instructs the footman Samuel on the other side.
Planks nailed across. Four of them. Hammering. The sound of metal sinking into the frame.
