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Teenage runaway; young stripper; writer of powerful, haunting stories. From Bad Behaviour in 1988, a story collection depicting seedy New York life, to Veronica in 2006, which follows a rollercoaster of a friendship between two women, Mary Gaitskill’s writing is often disturbing and always meticulously perceptive. In November 2021, we are pleased to publish a collection of Mary’s tender yet daring essays Oppositions, alongside striking reissues of the novella This is Pleasure, the Women’s Prize for Fiction-longlisted novel The Mare and the short story collection Don’t Cry.

In this retrospective we explore Mary’s published books and their recurring themes of feminism, relationships and sexuality.

Tell us which of Mary Gaitskill’s works you’ve read – or plan to read – over at Twitter @serpentstail and Instagram @serpentstail.

OPPOSITIONS (2021)

Oppositions is a collection of nuanced and provocative essays covering a broad range of subjects written with Mary Gaitskill’s characteristic linguistic flair. Spanning thirty years of her writing, and covering subjects as diverse as Dancer in the Dark, the world of Charles Dickens and the Book of Revelation with her classic blend of sincerity and wit, Oppositions is never less than enthralling.

‘Mary Gaitskill is willing to think about the problematic with complexity and humanity, and without taking sides or engaging in all the fashionable moral hectoring that passes for serious thought these days.’ Eimear McBride

THIS IS PLEASURE (2019; reissued 2021)

A provocative, nuanced novella about power, consent and friendship – and a masterful fictional contribution to the #MeToo debate.

Following the unravelling of the life of a male publisher undone by allegations of sexual impropriety and harassment, and the female friend who tries to understand, and explain, his actions, it looks unflinchingly at our present moment and rejects moral certainties to show us that there are many sides to every story.

‘Gaitskill achieves a superb feat. She distils the suffering, anger, reactivity, danger and social recalibration of the #MeToo movement into an extremely potent, intelligent and nuanced account.’ Guardian

Now available in a beautiful reissue.

THE MARE (2016; reissued 2021)

The Mare is Mary Gaitskill’s first novel in over a decade. Ginger is in her forties and a recovering alcoholic when she meets and marries Paul. When it becomes clear it’s too late for her to have a baby of her own, she tries to persuade him to consider adoption – but he refuses. As a compromise, they sign up to an organisation that sends poor inner-city kids to stay with country families for a few weeks in the summer, and so one hot July day eleven year old Velveteen Vargas, a Dominican girl from one of Brooklyn’s toughest neighbourhoods, arrives in their lives, and Ginger is instantly besotted.

While Velvet returns her affection, she finds the intensity of it bewildering. Velvet discovers she has a natural talent for riding and a deep affinity with the damaged horses cared for there. But when Ginger begins to entertain fantasies of adopting her, things start to get complicated for everyone involved.

‘Visceral and haunting, and the telling, with its shifting first person narrative, is nothing short of masterful’ GQ

Now available in a beautiful reissue.

DON’T CRY: STORIES (2009; reissued 2021)

A set of short stories which once again delves into the messy, broken and often out-of-control lives of ‘normal’ people. As the New York Times writes,

‘The people in Gaitskill’s stories often behave unconventionally and impulsively; they may seem to have an agency outside their author’s control, doing what not even she could expect, but they never escape her pitiless eye and meticulous hand.’

Read an extracted short story, Mirrorball 

Now available in a beautiful reissue.

VERONICA (2005; reissued in 2016)

Shortlisted for the National Book Award, Veronica is the story of the friendship between Alison and Veronica, who meet amid the nocturnal glamour of 1980s New York: one is a former modeling sensation, the other an eccentric middle-aged proofreader.

Over the next twenty years their friendship will encompass narcissism and tenderness, exploitation and self-sacrifice, love and mortality.  Moving seamlessly between the glamorous and gritty ’80s, when beauty and style gave licence to excess, and the broken world of the decade’s survivors twenty years later, Gaitskill casts a fierce yet compassionate eye on the two eras and their fixations.

BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO (1997)

In these stories, ‘Mary Gaitskill charts the twists and turns of emotion and desire, in fanatically analytical prose that zips along in a fever of self-consciousness that would seem loony if her observations weren’t so sane’ New York Times

Read an extracted story: Tiny Smiling Daddy

TWO GIRLS, FAT AND THIN (1991)

Mary’s first novel explores the experiences of those alienated from society. A journalist, Justine (‘thin girl’) interviews Dorothy (‘fat girl’) about her time as a member of a cult led by an author. Though they have very different backgrounds, the two girls find they have both experienced vicitimisation at the hands of their parents.

Kirkus reviews wrote,

‘Gaitskill fully understands the psycho-dynamics of being a misfit, and hence the appeal of such as Rand. But her fine and disturbing novel is also a stunning work of the imagination–genuine and luminous.’

Two Girls is one of the books referenced in the Rumpus article ‘What Men Talk About When They Talk About Mary Gaitskill’, which argued that men feel uncomfortable reading Gaitskill’s work and thus are inclined to review it negatively. This in turn prompted Mary Gaitskill’s ‘open letter’, in which she rebuffs this claim: ‘in truth some of my best support has come from men’.

BAD BEHAVIOUR (1988)

In her first collection of stories Mary Gaitskill explores love, lust, infatuation and power within relationships. In a blog written for Waterstones ‘On Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behaviour‘, author Zoe Pilger wrote:

‘Like the HBO TV series Sex and The City, which came a decade later in the late 90s, Bad Behaviour documents the lives of women trying to find their way in New York. Unlike the writers of Sex and The City, however, Gaitskill doesn’t pretend that the apotheosis of a woman’s life is finding ‘The One’.’

The story entitled ‘Secretary’ inspired the controversial film of the same name, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Visit our fanzine for more Mary Gaitskill: marygaitskill.tumblr.com

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!

For Black History Month, we asked some of our Serpent’s Tail authors – present and future – as well as members of our publishing team to write a little something about their favourite book by a black author. Take a read of their excitingly varied recommendations below!

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Ghulami ain Azadi Ja Ibratnak Nazara (Eye-Opening Accounts of Slavery and Freedom) by Mussafir
Chosen by Alice Albinia, author of Cwen

Pakistan has a small black community, the Sheedis, descendants of slaves brought from east Africa. In 1952 a Sheedi writer who went by the pen-name of ‘Mussafir’ (traveller) wrote a polemical book in Sindhi, a language of southern Pakistan. Ghulami ain Azadi Ja Ibratnak Nazara (Eye-Opening Accounts of Slavery and Freedom) describes both the inter-racial aspect of early Islam, the slavery era from eye-witness accounts (Mussafir’s own father was sold into slavery in Zanzibar), and how this mistreatment has lasted into modern Pakistan (seventy years on, not much has changed). This important book has not yet been published in English.

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Quicksand & Passing by Nella Larsen
Chosen by Flora Willis, Head of Marketing 

Probably my favourite book in the Serpent’s Tail Classics series is Nella Larsen’s Quicksand & Passing (two novellas in one book). A key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Larsen writes powerfully about being mixed race at this time. Her women are both fierce and vulnerable, navigating an often hostile world. It’s soon going to be a Netflix film with Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson – look out for our new edition.

 

 

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Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip
Chosen by Nat Ogle, author of In the Seeing Hands of Others (publishing January 2022)

Zong! is a majestic and mournful memorial to the 150 enslaved Africans who were thrown overboard the slave ship Zong in the belief that its owners could collect insurance monies on destroyed “cargo”. It’s a reparative invocation of the massacred, composed entirely from the texts of the legal case between the owners and their insurers. Voices irreconcilable with the coloniser’s syntax emerge from vast breaths of remembrance, drifting, fragmenting and assembling over the “water / of / w/ant” for justice. In its disentangling and abstracting the legal document, where human experience intersects with cold-blooded taxonomy, where lives are rendered into contestable property, Zong! reclaims the human from inhumanity: my high-water mark for documentary literature formed through a poetics of care.

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The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee
Chosen by Georgia Poplett, Editorial Assistant 

What was the fastest way to drain a swimming pool in 1950s America? The answer, as Heather McGhee says in The Sum of Us: integrate it. This grim reality forms the central image of the system undercutting the story of American racism in McGhee’s trailblazing book. A former Demos president and expert in economic and social policy, she investigates why white voters support racist legislation – even when they disadvantage themselves in the process. McGhee writes with clarity and compassion, making this an exceptional read which should be on everyone’s bookshelf.

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Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib
Chosen by Gurnaik Johal, author of We Move (publishing April 2022)

Charting the career of A Tribe Called Quest from the 90s to 2016, Go Ahead In The Rain is an intimate exploration of one of America’s most influential bands. Abdurraqib situates Tribe in a long tradition of American musicians but grounds the book in a fan’s perspective, making it as much a personal coming of age story as a music biography. Written in rhythmic prose and made up of essays, memoir and letters, the book is as compellingly patched together and richly textured as a Tribe sample, and I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading about music.

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Dirty South by Alex Wheatle
Chosen by Niamh Murray, Campaigns Director

I loved Alex Wheatle’s Dirty South when we published it for Serpent’s Tail a few years back – set in Brixton, it follows a teenager who drifts into street dealing and evokes the lives of his friends and family brilliantly. We’re delighted to have another book from Alex on the list in 2022, part of the Quick Reads series for adults working on improving their literacy, Witness is published next spring.

 

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White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Chosen by Rosie Parnham, Marketing Executive

Zadie Smith’s debut White Teeth is without a doubt a modern classic. Smith deftly captures our multicultural capital, following three generations of Londoners and their interlinked stories. It covers serious topics, whilst still being laugh-out-loud funny – don’t get me started on one of my favourite scenes in any book: a brilliant rant about Harvest Festival from central character Samad. It is a novel to which I return and recommend time and time again.

 

‘A warm invitation to relax into and enjoy the experience of cooking and eating.’ Nigella Lawson

Ruby Tandoh wants us all to cook, and this is her cookbook for all of us – the real home cooks, juggling babies or long commutes, who might have limited resources and limited time. From last-minute inspiration to delicious meals for one, easy one-pot dinners to no-chop recipes for when life keeps your hands full, Ruby brings us 100 delicious, affordable and achievable recipes, including salted malted magic ice cream, one-tin smashed potatoes with lemony sardines and pesto and an easy dinner of plantain, black beans and eden rice.

This is a new kind of cookbook for our times: an accessible, inclusive and inspirational addition to any and every kitchen. You don’t have to be an aspiring chef for your food to be delectable or for cooking to be a delight. Cook as you are.

Follow @rubytandoh

Get your copy of Cook As You Are

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STORECUPBOARD BROWNIES

The very best, fudgiest, most chocolatey brownies are those made with a lot of dark chocolate. But let’s be realistic: by the time your sweet-toothed cravings are baying for brownie blood, you’ve probably already eaten all the chocolate in the house, from a lone Malteser rolling round at the bottom of a blazer pocket to those last Bounties in the chocolate tin. With that in mind, this is a brownie recipe for when you weren’t planning to make brownies at all: a cocoa-based emergency recipe for when the craving strikes but your cupboards are pretty much bare.

A quick note: cocoa powder is not the same as drinking chocolate powder! The latter is bulked out with sugar and often with milk powder, too – ideal for sweet, milky hot chocolate, but it doesn’t have the chocolatey kick you’ll need for these brownies.

Bakes: 8–10 brownies

Ready in: less than 40 minutes, but you’ll need to let the brownies cool before tucking in

Make-ahead and storage tips: page 334

150ml vegetable, olive or coconut oil
175g soft light brown sugar
2 medium or large eggs
3 tablespoons milk, dairy or non-dairy
100g plain flour
50g cocoa powder
1½ teaspoons instant coffee granules
1 teaspoon vanilla extract, optional
½ teaspoon salt
Special equipment: 15

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/fan 160°C/gas mark 4 and line your tin with baking paper. If you don’t have this exact tin size and shape, a 20cm round tin is very close in volume and is a fine alternative. It’s also worth noting that if you make half of the above quantity, it’ll fit perfectly in a 900g loaf tin – ideal for an emergency stash.
2. Whisk together the oil and light brown sugar in a large bowl (melt the coconut oil first, if that’s what you’re using and if it’s solid). Add the eggs and the milk.
3. Into this wet mix, whisk the flour, cocoa powder, instant coffee granules, vanilla extract (if you have it) and salt. Stir until the batter is more or less smooth, with no big clumps. Pour into the prepared baking tin and bake for 15–20 minutes. When ready, it shouldn’t be liquid or wobbly if you shake it, but a knife inserted into the centre should still come out with a small amount of gooey batter on it. Give them a few minutes more if necessary, but err on the side of fudgy and underdone rather than cakey and overbaked. Once they’re completely cool, cut into pieces and serve.

Variations and substitutions:
To make vegan brownies, forget the eggs, and use 150ml non-dairy milk instead of the 3 tablespoons specified above. For a gluten-free version, make the brownies as above but use a gluten-free plain
flour blend in place of the plain white flour.

These are also delicious made with butter! Just swap the oil for 180g melted butter, and decrease the amount of milk from 3 tablespoons to 1 tablespoon.

Swap the soft light brown sugar for caster sugar if that’s all you have.

Occasionally I make these with miso, which adds a gentle salty, umami edge. Leave out the salt in this case, and whisk 1–2 tablespoons white miso into the batter, to taste.

If you or your family don’t consume caffeine, you can of course use a decaffeinated coffee or leave the coffee granules out altogether. At the other end of the spectrum, if you’re a coffee aficionado and don’t keep granules in the house, just use strong espresso in place of the 3 tablespoons milk (or a long black or white coffee in place of the 150ml non-dairy milk, if you’re making the vegan version.)

As far as additions go, the world’s your oyster here. I kept the ingredient list as short as I could get away with, but if you happen to have walnuts or pecans, chunks of dark or white chocolate, freeze‑dried berries or fudge pieces in the cupboard, by all means, chuck them in.

Tired of staycations? Us too. How about being transported to the pine islands of Matsushima instead?

August is Women in Translation month, and our intern, Carina Bryan, has put together a list of award-winning books for you to escape into.

Tell us about your favourite woman in translation – @SerpentsTail

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THE PINE ISLANDS – Marion Poschman (Translated by Jen Calleja)

A charming, playful, profound tale of lost souls in search of transformation in modern Japan.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2019

When Gilbert wakes one day from a dream that his wife has cheated on him, he flees – immediately and inexplicably – for Tokyo, where he meets a fellow lost soul: Yosa, a young Japanese student clutching a copy of The Complete Manual of Suicide. Together, Gilbert and Yosa set off on a pilgrimage to see the pine islands of Matsushima, one looking for the perfect end to his life, the other for a fresh start.

Playful and profound, The Pine Islands is a beautiful tale of friendship, transformation and acceptance in modern Japan.

 

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THE LITTLE COMMUNIST WHO NEVER SMILED – Lola Lafon (Translated by Nick Caistor)

The Montreal Olympics, 1976. A fourteen-year-old girl steps out onto the floor of the Montreal Forum and into history.

Twenty seconds on the uneven bars is it all it takes for Nadia Comaneci, the slight, unsmiling child from Communist Romania, to etch herself into the collective memory. The judges award her an unprecedented perfect ten, the first in Olympic gymnastics.

In The Little Communist Who Never Smiled, Lola Lafon weaves an intricate web of truth and fiction around Comaneci’s life, from her discovery by legendary gymnastics coach Béla Károlyi up to her defection to the United States in 1989.

Adored by young girls in the West and appropriated as a political emblem by the Ceausescu regime, Comaneci was a fearless, fiercely determined child whose body would become a battleground in the Cold War story of East against West. Lafon’s novel is a powerful re-imagining of a childhood in the spotlight of history, politics and destiny.

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THE DISASTER TOURIST – Yun Ko-eun (Translated by Lizzie Buehler)

A satirical Korean eco-thriller with a fierce feminist sensibility.

WINNER OF THE CWA CRIME IN TRANSLATION DAGGER

Yona has been stuck behind a desk for years working as a programming coordinator for Jungle, a travel company specialising in package holidays to destinations ravaged by disaster. When a senior colleague touches her inappropriately she tries to complain, and in an attempt to bury her allegations, the company make her an attractive proposition: a free ticket for one of their most sought-after trips, to the desert island of Mui.

She accepts the offer and travels to the remote island, where the major attraction is a supposedly-dramatic sinkhole. When the customers who’ve paid a premium for the trip begin to get frustrated, Yona realises that the company has dangerous plans to fabricate an environmental catastrophe to make the trip more interesting, but when she tries to raise the alarm, she discovers she has put her own life in danger.

We are thrilled to have bought two more “twisting and chilling” novels from crime and thriller writer Catriona Ward, author of The Last House on Needless Street!

Looking Glass Sound will tell the story of unsuccessful author Tom, who has travelled to a lonely cottage on the New England coast, fleeing the break-up of his marriage. He intends to write his final novel, with the protagonist based on his nemesis, Sky, who is now dead.

The synopsis explains: “Sky and Tom were once close, but after the publication of Sky’s first novel, ‘Looking Glass Sound’, Sky’s fame and ego drove them apart. Tom’s book will be a thinly veiled account of their friendship, painting Sky as a monstrous Patricia Highsmith figure. But this final act of revenge does not go as planned. Tom discovers notes in Sky’s handwriting in the cottage, written in his favourite green ink, making crushing comments about Tom’s writing and broken heart. Is Sky haunting Tom? Or is he still alive?”

Viper published Ward’s modern gothic thriller The Last House on Needless Street in March this year, to critical acclaim. It was a BBC2 “Between the Covers” Book Club pick, a bestseller, and both a Times and Observer Thriller of the Month. The paperback is publishing on 17th September, with Ward’s next novel, Sundial, coming in March 2022.

Miranda Jewess, editorial director at the Serpent’s Tail crime imprint Viper, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, plus audio, to Looking Glass Sound and an untitled second novel in a two-book deal from Jenny Savill at Andrew Nurnberg Associates. Looking Glass Sound is scheduled for publication in March 2023.

Jewess said: “Looking Glass Sound is a twisting and chilling tale, where nothing is as it seems and the reader never knows who to believe. To say any more would be to spoil it, which is something I adore about Cat’s novels; they ask the reader to trust her, and she always repays that trust. The response to The Last House on Needless Street was a dream come true for a young imprint, and we’re delighted that Cat will continue to publish with Viper for years to come. She’s such a talented and responsive author to work with—I feel extremely lucky.”

Ward added: “In a few short years Miranda Jewess and Viper have proved, again and again, that their innovative, dedicated and inspirational publishing can introduce unconventional, high-concept books to a wide readership. Individually and as a team Viper have enormous heart and the keenest of instincts. I feel immensely privileged to be setting out on another adventure with this dynamic, exciting imprint.”

‘You’ll learn to be too much, too. I think it might help.’

When Julia flees her unhappy marriage for the handsome tailor Eve Perret, she expects her life from now on will be a challenge, not least because the year is 1911. They leave everything behind to settle in Vienna, but their happiness is increasingly diminished by Julia’s longing for a child.

Ada Bauer’s wealthy industrialist family have sent her to Dr Freud in the hope that he can fix her mutism and do so without a scandal. But help will soon come for Ada from an unexpected quarter and change many lives irrevocably.

All of You Every Single One is an epic novel about family, freedom and how true love might survive impossible odds.

Buy your copy

Read an extract below.

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PROLOGUE

The lake is freezing. The words – gelid, boreal, glacial – don’t do it justice. Chunks of the whole break away, float and sink. Black oiliness, the consistency of nightmares; impossible to see where you should put your feet.

Snow is falling, silent and determined. The beach is quickly smothered – the pebbles, the upturned boat and the reeds become mere grey shapes. The lawn, sloping upwards to the house, glitters. The occupants are in the deep sleep of the very cold. They knew the storm was coming, but the body does not always understand what it’s told the first time. The blood retreats in such circumstances to the inner organs; fingers curl into soft palms; the hair forms a nest around the neck and shoulders.

The nursery is different. In this room, the fire burns all night – it’s hard enough to get a three-week-old to sleep without the added complication of the cold. The baby is awake, waving her fists in vague figures of eight, staring up at the woman bending over the crib, who makes a shushing sound, and though the child is too small to understand, or to make out more than the blurred outline of a face, she closes her eyes.

An ember from the fire lands on the rug. The woman stares at it as it flares and dies. She picks up the haversack, in which are packed cloth nappies, blankets, some stale bread that won’t be missed and fifty Kronen stolen from Herr K.’s wallet. The baby is gathered up in a bundle of warmth and cloth. She turns to the door, opens and listens: the rasp of the butler’s snoring. She spares a thought for him – he has always been kind to her – then walks down the corridor and hesitates at the top of the stairs. The child smacks her lips in the darkness as she creeps on.

In the downstairs hallway, she puts the baby, very gently, on to the carpet runner and goes to accomplish the business of covering her tracks. On her return, she unhooks her coat from the coat-rack next to the front door. It is even colder on this level, heat rising, as it will; she can feel her fingers stiffening already. She lifts the coat and shrugs it on.

An oil lamp has been wavering, unnoticed, along the corridor from the back of the house: gold corona, craggy shadows. A man’s face, bruised with sleep. His fingers, where they hold the lamp base, are a throbbing, sea-anemone pink.

‘I heard a noise,’ he says.

He must already know something is wrong, but he has always been slow to cross into the waking world. He raises one fist to grind it into his eye – trying to appear charming and childlike, even now – and with the other he puts the lamp on the hall table. The halo moves, showing him what’s on the floor: the blind-mouse eyes and pale round face, bundled in bonnet and blankets. The bag.

‘Where are you taking her?’ he asks. The beginnings of a sneer. ‘Out for a walk?’

She snatches up the first lamp and brings it round in a wide arc; it connects with his temple. The clunk of bone sinking tectonically into itself: if she’s lucky, a compound depressed fracture of the left parietal bone. He folds to the floor like a cheap prima donna, and she picks up his daughter and moves to the door. Oil has spilled on the carpet and the lamp is extinguished. There is no blood that she can see. The door creaks as it opens but it is too late to worry about that. She steps out into the suffocating quiet of the snowstorm.

In fairy tales, such things happen at midnight. In fact, it is half past two in the morning, in a home belonging to the prominent Bauer family – the engineering Bauers – in the small community of Podersdorf on the shores of the Neusiedlersee, Austria’s largest lake. It is 1913, and somebody in this house is stealing a baby.

Summer has finally arrived with a blazing heatwave, and we have your reading covered with some books to celebrate the heat and others to cool you down (even if it’s by the coolness of the author). So pick up a book and a fan and get ready to enjoy or escape the heat. Knowing the UK weather, we know it won’t last long!

Tell us what you’re reading during this heatwave – @SerpentsTail

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HEAT-SEEKERS:

THE DISASTER TOURIST – Yun Ko-eun

A satirical Korean eco-thriller with a fierce feminist sensibility.

WINNER OF THE CWA CRIME IN TRANSLATION DAGGER

Yona has been stuck behind a desk for years working as a programming coordinator for Jungle, a travel company specialising in package holidays to destinations ravaged by disaster. When a senior colleague touches her inappropriately she tries to complain, and in an attempt to bury her allegations, the company make her an attractive proposition: a free ticket for one of their most sought-after trips, to the desert island of Mui.

She accepts the offer and travels to the remote island, where the major attraction is a supposedly-dramatic sinkhole. When the customers who’ve paid a premium for the trip begin to get frustrated, Yona realises that the company has dangerous plans to fabricate an environmental catastrophe to make the trip more interesting, but when she tries to raise the alarm, she discovers she has put her own life in danger.

Get your copy

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UNDER THE BLUE – Oana Aristide

A lead debut novel: a literary thriller about a pandemic, the rise of AI, and how – or why – we might save the human race.

A road trip beneath clear blue skies and a blazing sun: a reclusive artist is forced to abandon his home and follow two young sisters across a post-pandemic Europe in search of a safe place. Is this the end of the world?

Meanwhile two computer scientists have been educating their baby in a remote location. Their baby is called Talos, and he is an advanced AI program. Every week they feed him data, starting from the beginning of written history, era by era, and ask him to predict what will happen next to the human race. At the same time they’re involved in an increasingly fraught philosophical debate  about why human life is sacred and why the purpose for which he was built – to predict threats to human life to help us avoid them – is a worthwhile and ethical pursuit.

These two strands come together in a way that is always suspenseful, surprising and intellectually provocative: this is an extraordinarily prescient and vital work of fiction – an apocalyptic road novel to frighten and thrill.

Get your copy

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BEFORE THE RUINS – Victoria Gosling

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

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.

Get your copy

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ICE QUEENS:

THE WINTER WAR – Philip Teir

So you thought life in Scandinavia was perfect?

On the surface, the Paul family are living the liberal, middle-class dream in Helsinki. Max Paul is a renowned sociologist and his wife Katriina has a well-paid government job. They live in a beautiful apartment in the centre of the city. But look closer and the cracks start to show.

As he approaches his sixtieth birthday, the certainties of Max’s life begin to dissolve. His wife no longer loves him, and his grown-up daughters – one in London, one in Helsinki – have problems of their own.  So when a former student turned journalist shows up and offers him a seductive lifeline, Max starts down a dangerous path from which he may never find a way back.

Funny, sharp, and brilliantly truthful, Teir’s debut has the feel of a big, contemporary, humane American novel, but with a distinctly Scandinavian edge.

Get your copy

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ON TIME AND WATER – Andri Snær Magnason

A unique approach to climate change that recalls W. G. Sebald.

Icelandic author and activist Andri Snær Magnason’s ‘Letter to the Future’, an extraordinary and moving eulogy for the lost Okjökull glacier, made global news and was shared by millions. Now he attempts to come to terms with the issues we all face in his new book On Time and Water. Magnason writes of the melting glaciers, the rising seas and acidity changes that haven’t been seen for 50 million years. These are changes that will affect all life on earth.

Taking a path to climate science through ancient myths about sacred cows, stories of ancestors and relatives and interviews with the Dalai Lama, Magnason allows himself to be both personal and scientific. The result is an absorbing mixture of travel, history, science and philosophy.

Get your copy

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MAN ENOUGH TO BE A WOMAN – Jayne County

The true story of trans punk performance art sensation Jayne County’s wild and daring life.

Born in rural Georgia in 1947, Jayne moved to New York and became part of the 60s art scene surrounding Andy Warhol’s Factory. Jayne’s story follows the arc of LGBT liberation in the US – she came of age living hand-to-mouth, faced off against police at Stonewall and came out as a trans woman while she was touring Europe with her band. She went everywhere and met everyone and lived to tell the tale.

Man Enough to Be a Woman is the funny, fierce memoir of Jayne’s extraordinary journey, now including a new epilogue where she reflects on how the world has (almost) caught up with her.

Get your copy

***Now a Top 5 Sunday Times Bestseller!***

We are thrilled to reveal that the incredible, innovative crime novel THE APPEAL by Janice Hallett has been crowned the Waterstones Thriller of the Month!

The Waterstones exclusive edition includes the first chapter from Janice’s next book, THE TWYFORD CODE – order yours here.

 

ABOUT THE BOOK

In a town full of secrets…
Someone was murdered.
Someone went to prison.
And everyone’s a suspect.
Can you uncover the truth?

*** THE SUNDAY TIMES CRIME BOOK OF THE MONTH ***

‘This dazzlingly clever cosy crime novel completely trumps Richard Osman. A modern Agatha Christie’ – SUNDAY TIMES

‘This is a case you’re about to become obsessed with. A triumph’ – ALEX NORTH

‘Gripping. I loved the ambitious and unusual approach’ – SOPHIE HANNAH

Dear Reader – enclosed are all the documents you need to solve a case. It starts with the arrival of two mysterious newcomers to the small town of Lockwood, and ends with a tragic death.

Someone has already been convicted of this brutal murder and is currently in prison, but we suspect they are innocent. What’s more, we believe far darker secrets have yet to be revealed.

Throughout the Fairway Players’ staging of All My Sons and the charity appeal for little Poppy Reswick’s life-saving medical treatment, the murderer hid in plain sight. Yet we believe they gave themselves away. In writing. The evidence is all here, between the lines, waiting to be discovered.

Will you accept the challenge? Can you uncover the truth?

BUY YOUR COPY

Follow @janicehallett on Twitter

 

We are delighted that the incredible THE FIVE WOUNDS by Kirstin Valdez Quade has been crowned Booksellers’ Association Indie Book of the Month! Look out for this stunning story of family and sacrifice in your local independent bookshop.

 

ABOUT THE BOOK

From an award-winning storyteller comes a stunning debut novel following one family’s extraordinary year of love and sacrifice.

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This year Amadeo Padilla is Jesus. The hermanos have been preparing in the dirt yard behind the morada.

This is no silky-haired, rosy-cheeked, honey-eyed Jesus, no Jesus-of-the-children, Jesus-with-the-lambs. Amadeo is muscled, hair shaved close to a scalp scarred from teenage fights, roll of skin where skull meets neck.

Amadeo is building the cross out of heavy rough oak instead of pine. He’s barefoot like the other hermanos, who have rolled their cuffs and sing alabados. They have washed their white pants, braided their disciplinas the old way, from the thick fibers of yucca leaves, mended rips in the black hoods they will wear to ensure their humility in this reenactment. The Hermano Mayor— Amadeo’s skinny grand- tío Tíve, who surprised them all when he chose his niece’s lazy son— plays the pito, and the thin piping notes rise.

Today Amadeo woke with the idea of studding the cross with nails to give it extra weight. He holds the hammer with both hands high above his head, brings it down with a crack. The boards bounce, the sound strikes off the outside wall of the morada and, across the alley, the Idle Hour Cantina.

Amadeo has broken out in a sweat. Amadeo sweats, but not usually from work. He sweats when he eats, he sweats when he drinks too much. Thirty- three years old, same as Our Lord, but Amadeo is not a man with ambition. Even his mother will tell you that, though it breaks her heart to admit it. Yolanda still cooks for him, setting a plate before him at his place at the table.

This afternoon, though, even Amadeo’s tattoos seem to strain with his exertion, and he’s seeing himself from outside and above. A flaming Sacred Heart beats against his left pectoral, sweat drips from the point of a bloodied dagger on his bicep, and the roses winding around his side bloom against the heat of his effort. On his back, the Guadalupana glistens brilliantly, her dress scarred with the three vertical cuts of the sellos, the secret seals of obligation. The lines, each the length of a man’s hand, are raised and pink and newly healed, evidence of his initiation into the hermandad.

Though Amadeo has lived in Las Penas his whole life, today he sees the village anew: the lines are sharper, the colors purer. The weeds along the edge of the fence, the links of the fence itself, the swaying tops of the cottonwood trees— everything is in preternatural focus. The morada is lit by the sun sinking orange at his back, the line sharp between cinderblock and sky. He brings the hammer down, hitting each nail true, enjoying the oiled rotation of his joints, the fatigue in his muscles. He feels righteous and powerful, his every movement predetermined. He feels born for the role.

Then he pounds the last nail, and he’s back in his body, and the hermanos are wrapping up, heading home.

———

When Amadeo pulls up the gravel drive to the house, his daughter Angel is sitting on the steps, eight months pregnant. She lives in Española with her mom. He hasn’t seen her in more than a year, but he’s heard the news from his mother, who heard it from Angel.

White tank top, black bra, gold cross pointing the way to her breasts in case you happened to miss them. Belly as hard and round as an horno. The buttons of her jeans are unsnapped to make way for its fullness, and also to indicate how this happened in the first place. Her birthday is this week, falls on Good Friday. She’ll be sixteen.

“Shit,” Amadeo says, and yanks the parking brake. This last week was the most important week in Jesus’s life. This is the week everything happened. So Amadeo’s mind should be trained on sacrifice and resurrection, not his daughter’s teen pregnancy.

She must not see his expression, because she gets up, smiles, and waves with both hands. The rosary swings on his rearview mirror, and Amadeo watches as, beyond it, his daughter advances on the truck, stomach outthrust. She pauses, half turns, displays her belly.

She’s got a big gold purse with her, and a duffel bag, he sees, courtesy of Marlboro. Angel’s hug is straight on, belly pressing into him.

“I’m fat, huh? I barely got these pants and already they’re too small.”

“Hey.” He pats his daughter’s back gingerly between her bra straps, then steps away. “What’s happening?” he says. It’s too casual, but he can’t afford to let her think she’s welcome, not during Passion Week, and with his mother away.

“Ugh. Me and Mom got in a fight, so I told her to drive me here.” Her tone is light. “I didn’t know where you and Gramma were. I’ve been here, like, two hours, starving my head off. Pregnant people need to eat. I almost broke in just to make a sandwich. Don’t you guys check your phones?”

Amadeo hooks his thumbs in his pockets, looks up at the house, then back at the road. The sun is gone now, the dusk a nearly electric blue.

“A fight?” In spite of himself, Amadeo takes some pleasure in Angel’s indignation at her mother. Marissa has always made him feel insufficient.

“I can’t even. Whatever,” she says with conviction. “What me and the baby need right now is a support system. That’s what I told her.”

Amadeo shakes his head. “I’m real busy,” he says, like an actor portraying regret. “Now’s not a good time.”

Angel doesn’t look hurt, just interested. “Why? You got a job or something?”

She lifts her duffel and begins to walk toward the door, swaying under the weight of luggage and belly. “My mom’s not here,” he calls. He’s embarrassed to tell her the real reason he wants her gone, embarrassed by the fervor that being a penitente implies.

“Where’d Gramma go?” There’s real worry in her voice. She holds the screen open with her hip, waiting for him to unlock the door.

“Listen, it’s a busy week.” He rushes this next part, his breath short. “I’m carrying the cross this year. I’m Jesus.”

 

From acclaimed author of The Warlow Experiment, the moving story of a mother and daughter separated in Regency England

 

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The celebrated Aëronaut M André-Jacques Garnerin

will Ascend in his gas Balloon

at Ranelagh

on 28 June 1802 at 5 o’clock

during an elegant Afternoon Breakfast

given by the Directors of the Pic Nic Society

in recognition of the new Peace of Amiens.

M Garnerin will be accompanied by

the renowned Artist and Engraver Mr Joseph Young

and, to prove the Safety of such Travel to

Members of the Fair Sex,

the well-known Proprietress of Battle’s Coffee House

Miss Sarah Battle

They walk through the crowd towards the enormous balloon, thirty feet in diameter, forty-five feet high, as big as a four-storey house, shifting gently against its anchoring ropes despite a hot,

almost breathless day. Its alternate dark-green and yellow segments are encased in a net, its oblong car draped in tricolours and Union Jacks. On the ground around it lies a cartwheel shape of barrels and pipes in which acid and iron filings have generated the hydrogen that fills the great globe.

The aëronaut waits for them in an elegant blue coat and French hat bearing the national cockade, chatting to bystanders and smiling, as if he were a showman at Bartholomew Fair encouraging people into his booth. Jacques Garnerin is sinewy and slight, his noble nose and thin, sharp features wind-burned, his skin toughened like a sailor’s.

Sarah, in a large beribboned bonnet, her best dress with its low neckline and short sleeves fashionable enough to quell her anxiety about what to wear, steps forward slowly, weighed by regret. Her jibe, fired off in annoyance, that women are just as able to fly in balloons as men, has brought her here. She is red with heat and self-consciousness. It’s not unlike the first day she stood at the bar in her father’s coffee house, replacing her newly dead mother, when men scanned her perpetually till she felt skinned.

Joseph strides ahead, can’t stop himself, bags and satchels hung about his tall, ungainly person.

Sarah turns to hug her daughter Eve, to kiss the girl in her pretty blue gown, who looks with bright eyes from her to the balloon and back, understanding only that her mother has chosen to travel in it, aware of a vast murmuring, a heaving sea of smiles.

‘I’ll be back soon, my love. Tonight, I hope.’ She moves over to the basket, wanting it all to be over.

Garnerin, the small, foreign entertainer, hands his two British aëronauts up steps into the car, springs into it like a boy. There’s only just room, for in the centre is ballast, bags of sand marked in quantities from kilos down to grams, suspended by four cords from the hoop at the base of the balloon’s netting. Attached to the car’s ropes are a thermometer, impressive compass, telescope and a barometer for measuring altitude. Baskets of provisions are stowed in lockers under the seat where Joseph will sit together with all his boxes of pens, pencils, chalks, brushes, paint, sketchbooks and blocks, perspective glasses and his own telescope. Jacques calculates that large Joseph, his equipment and a basket of food and drink will balance the weight on the opposite side of the car to Sarah and himself.

A band strikes up ‘God Save the King’. The Official Aëronaut of France, fidgeting throughout, stands to attention for the succeeding tune, which no one recognises.

‘But that is not the “Marseillaise”,’ says Joseph, puzzled.

‘It offend Bonaparte. I tell them they must play “Veillons au salut de l’Empire”. Soon he become Emperor.’

After four verses, during which it is the crowd’s turn to fidget and chatter, Garnerin unhooks bag after bag of ballast, hands them over the side of the car until the captive balloon pulls at its tethers.

At last he signals, assistants untie the ropes, restrain the great ball solely by muscle power. The crowds hush.

A dramatic sign, the ropes are loosed, a huge cheer breaks out, the ascent begins. Sarah feels the basket leave the ground, an upward pull through her body that makes her laugh aloud. Even as

her child slips further from her, the little girl’s face blearing in her sight, her legs weaken with pleasure and she grips the car to steady herself. Jacques, so many successful flights in hand, moves about with panache, making the balloon rise slowly, letting it hang over the gardens for maximum effect. He holds a flag of the République, gives Sarah a Union Jack and, with Joseph waving his sketchbook, they all three salute the crowds thronging the Gardens and all roads that lead to Ranelagh. The great vehicle moves massively, elegantly in a north-east direction, away from the packed banks of the river, from the waterworks, the creeks and sluice gates of Pimlico fenland. Still low enough for onlookers clustered in every window and housetop, perching in trees like cawing rooks.

Joseph, breathless with excitement, sketches rapidly as they sail over Green Park and St James’s. Ducks rise up, quacking from the lakes as the huge shadow passes. Westminster to the right, Charing Cross beneath.

‘Sarah, look! See the pillory in Charing Cross?’

‘I hope there’s no one in it.’

‘Come now, it’ll cheer a prisoner to see us fly over. At least it will distract the pelters. Here! Use my pocket telescope. I’ve not enough hands for it.’ His steel spectacles have a second set of lenses, tinted, hinged up until needed, for all like mad eyebrows.

Everywhere upturned faces.

 

We are delighted to be teaming up with Burley Fisher this Independent Bookshop Week. As part of our partnership the brilliant booksellers Ant, Dan, Enya, Sam & So have picked their top 10 Serpent’s Tail reads. Discover them below, and buy them over at the Burley Fisher website.

Follow @burleyfisher.

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To quote our review of Detransition, Baby, these are books where “Everything is terrible and everything is beautiful” – a Serpent’s Tail trait of seeing the world in its fullness and from the most necessary of angles.

In chronological order of publication, we’re showing some love to…

Quicksand & Passing, Nella Larsen (1928 & 1929)

A deserved all-time bestselling title for its US publisher, Nella Larsen’s two novels, written within a year of each other, come together as an excellent diptych, as both deal with psychic dualism – and in particular, the doubled double consciousness of Black women in 1920s America, drawing on Larsen’s own experience. Part of the bright, brilliant blaze of the Harlem Renaissance, Quicksand and Passing retain their incendiary charge through their incisive and intimate portrayals of tightrope navigations of intertwined racial and gendered hierarchies. With a high-profile film adaptation of Passing starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga on its way, this is the perfect moment to read (or re-read) Larsen.

Jernigan, David Gates (1991)

I Love Dick, Chris Kraus (1997)

White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, Joe Boyd (2006)

If there’s someone who has seen it all in music, it’s Joe Boyd. In his book White Bicycles, the man who was pivotal in the early days of Pink Floyd, behind the desk when Nick Drake recorded River Man live with the LSO for Five Leaves Left, and managed the rise of Sandy Denny, recounts the forgotten details, secret encounters and whirlwind nights of the most important age in popular music. What’s remarkable about Boyd’s perspective is the varying vantage points he witnessed musical history from, whether as a manager, producer, club promoter or simply a friend to some of pop music’s greatest figures, there is no one who has had the access that Boyd has. It isn’t just about folk either, Boyd wanders through encounters with blues icons like Muddy Waters, psychedelic acid-rock pioneers Traffic and brushes shoulders with the likes of Miles Davis and Dylan. Always absorbing, often moving and told with great care and observation, this is a memoir of rare depth about a musical era we’d have all loved to live through.

I Hate the Internet, Jarett Kobek (2016)

The original cancel culture novel, I Hate the Internet by Jarett Kobek follows a semi-famous graphic novelist called Adeline. After a guest lecture to some students in which she gives a tirade against pop culture figures and women in technology, which is subsequently posted online, Adeline spends most of the novel trying to mitigate her negative online reputation while dealing with her ambivalent feelings about the huge boost in sales of her cult comic series that come along with it. This hilarious and anarchic novel attempts to cut up and imitate the online forms that it satirises, and it felt like the first natively post-social media novel I had read when it was published just as the first natively post-social media president took residence in the White House.

In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado (2019)

“I came of age, then, in the Dream House, wisdom practically smothering me in my sleep. Everything tasted like an almost epiphany.” Carmen Maria Machado dives deep into the “smothering” wisdom of folk tales to rip the roof off the Dream House of patriarchy. What does it mean to grow up with fairytales of romance that persistently cast women as passive, innocent, weak – and victims? And what happens when that pervasive fantasy meets the untold reality of violence within a lesbian relationship? In short, sharp sections that fold back and forth across time, collecting talismanic books and movies and moments that eventually plot an alternate story, Machado delves deep to offer stunning clarity as she breaks herself free. You read In the Dream House, as it was written, heart in mouth: every word tastes like blood.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals, Saidiya Hartman (2019)

From its epigraph from Nella Larsen’s Quicksand onwards, Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments plunges the reader into the exhilarating, complicated, stylish, sexy, determined, brilliant world of free Black women in early twentieth century Northern US: a world gleaned mainly from sources compiled by those who sought to control these riotous women who were, as Hartman argues, making the modern world: fighting for autonomy in their identity, sexuality, work, and creativity, their relation to their bodies, their neighbourhoods and their place in history. Bursting forth from sociological and criminological archives, refusing to be hidden or controlled, these radical, rebellious voices are braided by Hartman into an utterly irresistible, unforgettable chorus.

Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters (2021)

Detransition, Baby! sucks you in and doesn’t let up. Dark and funny, it’s outlandishness never seems far-fetched and more so focuses on allowing the characters to be flawed and loveable. The story is about Reese (a trans woman), Ames (Reese’s ex and detransitioned from being Amy), Katrina (a Jewish Chinese cis woman) and an unexpected pregnancy. It draws parallels between trans women and divorced cis women (the book’s dedication being to divorced women) and their struggles to reestablish their personhood. Refreshingly, the story never tries to equate any struggle with another, only to thread together compassion. Everything is terrible and everything is beautiful. Add it to your summer reading list and enjoy the ride!

Libertie, Kaitlyn Greenidge (2021)

Libertie Sampson doesn’t want to become a doctor. She doesn’t want to be a wife. She wants what her name offers: to be free. A freeborn Black girl who comes of age in rural Brooklyn just after the Civil War, witnessing its racist atrocities, Libertie loves and admires her doctor mother, but chafes at her strategic service to the disparaging white townspeople. She is drawn to complex figures of freedom’s possibilities and pains: first, Ben Daisy, a man escaping slavery but haunted by love; the Graces, two music students at the college where she is studying medicine (the only woman to do so), but falling in love with song; and Emmanuel, her mother’s skilful apprentice, the sophisticated scion of a middle-class family in Haiti, where she travels as his wife. Pregnancy leads her to uncover unbearable secrets in Emmanuel’s family, and her quest for freedom brings her full circle. A deeply satisfying tour de force.

Cwen, Alice Albinia (10% until end June) (2021)

At this point in 2021, we’re all about ready for a feminist revolution in government in the UK, right? But the inhabitants of an unnamed archipelago off Northumbria are deeply divided when Eve, a London incomer who has led a quiet, quirky and purposeful sea change in the governance and functioning of the islands, disappears, and an inquest takes place into just how her band of resisters took over. With deep roots in myths that placed a sacred island of women off the coast of Britain, Alice Albinia’s tale resonates in its consideration of gender politics, and in its spiritual search for reconnection.

‘…I don’t know what comes after, once I decide to let desire have its way with me. How to un-melt the melted? How to turn the ground powder back into a person? This idea points to a knowledge that I don’t have: how to love without losing the self.’

Plumbing the well of culture for clues about love and loss – from Agnes Martin’s abstract paintings to Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet to Frank Ocean’s Blonde – this brilliant work of debut nonfiction explores the state of falling in love, whether with a painting or a person.

Pham creates a perfectly fractured portrait of modern intimacy, triumphant in its vulnerability and restlessness. Pop Song is a book about distances: the miles we travel to get away from ourselves, or those who hurt us, and the impossible gaps that can exist between two people sharing a bed.

Here is a map to all the routes by which we might escape our own needs before finally finding a way home.

Read an extract below.

Follow Larissa on Twitter.

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Ways of knowing

when it’s time to go

A starting gun

A text message

A plane ticket

A phone call

Last call

An upside-down shot glass in front of you at the bar

An orgasm in an unfamiliar room

A failure to come

A silence

The moon is visible

 

The moon isn’t visible, and you want to find it

You’re the happiest you think you’ll ever be at this party

Everyone else around you is hailing a cab

The sun is setting

The pool is closing

They’ve turned off the fog machines

The sun is rising

The sun is rising and a song you love has started to play

We are thrilled to be teaming up with the brilliant Burley Fisher this Independent Bookshop Week. Burley Fisher were shortlisted for Independent Bookshop of the Year and made a name for themselves delivering books by bike during lockdown last year. Their fierce championing of LGBTQ+ authors and those from underrepresented backgrounds make them the perfect partner for Serpent’s Tail.

PRIDE POP-UP BOOK STALL

Our activity begins with a pop-up book stall in celebration of Pride Month, along with the excellent Cipher Press, this Saturday at Broadway Market in East London. There will be books, bunting, bookmarks, treats from Meringue Girls and plenty of coffee nearby, so do come down and say hi!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IN-STORE AND ONLINE

Independent Bookshop Week begins on the 19th June. Look out a takeover on our instagram account, and pop in store for tote bags, bookmarks, and free coffee (while stocks last). Get 10% off a list of handpicked books – from Nella Larsen to Alice Albinia – in-store and on the BF website.

ISOLATION STATION – THE PODCAST

In a special episode of Burley Fisher’s podcast, Sam Fisher and So Mayer speak to Serpent’s Tail publisher Hannah Westland about radical and readable books, Torrey Peters and what it’s like to be head of an indie publisher.

CARMEN MARIA MACHADO IN CONVERSATION – ONLINE EVENT

You can join in the fun wherever you are with an amazing online event with the inimitable, Rathbones Prize-winning author of In the Dream House and Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado.

Get your free tickets here 

Follow all the activity online at @burleyfisher and @serpentstail, #IndieBookshopWeek and #PrideMonth.

 

Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me is Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club pick for May, a #1 NYT bestseller and a #1 Amazon bestseller!

‘Holy Moly!… you will NOT be able to put this book down! If you’re looking for the ultimate page-turner, I highly recommend The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave.’
Reese Witherspoon

We’re absolutely thrilled with your response to Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me. Since we’re all dying to know more, our fearless editor Miranda Jewess did a Q&A with Laura. Read on to discover how Laura came up with the novel and all about the forthcoming TV series starring Julia Roberts.

Laura Dave also has a special message for her Viper readers. Click here to watch.

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1. The Last Thing He Told Me is quite different from your previous novels. What inspired you to write your first domestic thriller?

I absolutely love thrillers and read them constantly. But when I started writing The Last Thing He Told Me, I wanted to do it a little differently than I’d seen done before. I wanted to write a thriller rooted in hope. What I mean by that is I didn’t want the smoking gun to be that the husband turns out to be evil, or that the main character was wrong to trust herself, or that the story would hinge on betrayal. As my main character (Hannah Hall) navigated the twists and turns of her dilemma, I wanted her to find her way to somewhere unexpected, somewhere better. Instead of the constant reversals leading her to seek revenge or reimagine her entire life, Hannah found herself becoming the hero of her own life.

2. The heart of the novel is the relationship between Hannah and her stepdaughter Bailey. Was this inspired by a real mother/daughter dynamic?

I had my first child several years into working on this novel and it changed everything about the story I was hoping to tell. I understood Hannah in a new way, and her desire to be there for Bailey in the middle of her own struggle. The full landscape of Hannah’s narrative concretized for me. This involved reconsidering Hannah and Bailey’s relationships with their birth mothers, their ideas about motherhood and love, and of course the joy we can find in our found families.

3. The novel is going to be made into a TV series, with Julia Roberts starring as the main character, Hannah. Do you think the character will change through her depiction?

I’m writing the limited series now with my husband, the screenwriter Josh Singer. It’s been a dream to write this with Julia Roberts in mind, and to bring her energy to Hannah’s character.

4. Was the brilliant ending planned or did it change as you wrote? No spoilers!

I worked on this book for many years, on and off, and had many different endings that I considered along the way. But it was after I gave birth to my son in 2016 that I realized Hannah’s story, in the most primal sense, was the story of becoming a mother. For me, the book is the call to that—and the ending is the answer. Once I found it, I never wavered in believing that was where this novel needed to end. I’ve started imagining the sequel to this book. So it is possible this ending will turn out to be more of an intermission… and this family will have a new act, after all.

5. What book or author do you recommend to everyone?

Heartburn by Nora Ephron and Defending Jacob by William Landay.