Uncategorized

We’re delighted that Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me is Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club pick for May!

Not only is this gripping book soon to be a major TV series starring Julia Roberts, a #1 Amazon bestseller, a Vogue Best Books to Read in 2021, an Amazon Best Book of May 2021, a Reader’s Digest 50 Best Books to Read This Year and a NetGalley Book of the Month for May, it is now also a Reese Witherspoon pick for May!

See what Reese had to say:

‘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.

This story centers around Hannah, who is settling into her new role as a wife & stepmother when her husband suddenly disappears leaving her with an ominous note and a request to protect his daughter.
There’s so much to love about this thrilling, roller coaster of a novel: mysterious identities, unreliable friendships, dubious loyalties and terrifying chase sequences through the streets of Austin, Texas.

Pick up a copy and join me to discuss our May 2021 pick!’

See her announcement on Reese’s Book Club:

‘Love note to self: the May #ReesesBookClub pick is a juicy, secret-filled read that you’ll finish in a day and talk about for months.

“The Last Thing He Told Me” by Laura Dave gives new meaning to the phrase ‘you can never judge a book (OR suspicious husband) by its cover’ with her gripping tale of love, deception and disappearance.

If the thrilling start doesn’t hook you—a missing husband, a duffel bag of cash, a cryptic note and teenage stepdaughter drama—wait till you find out how it ends. Warning: there’s so many secrets that you may start to question if you can even trust yourself.’

Learn more about the book:

IT WAS THE LAST THING HE TOLD ME: PROTECT HER

Before Owen Michaels disappears, he manages to smuggle a note to his new wife, Hannah: protect her. Hannah knows exactly who Owen needs her to protect – his sixteen-year-old daughter, Bailey, who lost her mother tragically as a child. And who wants absolutely nothing to do with her new stepmother.

As her increasingly desperate calls to Owen go unanswered, his boss is arrested for fraud and the police start questioning her, Hannah realises that her husband isn’t who he said he was. And that Bailey might hold the key to discovering Owen’s true identity, and why he disappeared. Together they set out to discover the truth. But as they start putting together the pieces of Owen’s past, they soon realise that their lives will never be the same again…

A beautiful and thrilling mystery, perfect for readers of Lianne Moriarty and Celeste Ng.

Pick up a copy of the hardback, order the ebook, or download the audiobook today, but make sure you #CancelYourPlans before reading. You won’t want to stop.

 

We are thrilled to be publishing To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, a ‘hugely significant autobiographical novel about queer friendship, gay life and the early days of the AIDS crisis’ by French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert (1955-1991) on the Serpent’s Tail Classics list this July.

To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life will feature a newly commissioned foreword by Maggie Nelson, an introduction from Frieze editor Andrew Durbin and an afterword from Edmund White in a translation by Linda Coverdale.

Nelson said: “It’s an absolute honour to write an introduction to Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, which is one of the most important books to me (my intro will try to explain why). Its reprint is a cause for celebration and I’m thrilled to be a part of it.”

Dunnigan said: “To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life is a book that, once read, will live with you for a long time. Guibert’s story of a friendship betrayed and of living with AIDS is devastating, darkly funny and full of tenderness, and speaks to that ‘borderline of uncertainty, so familiar to all sick people everywhere’.

“His razor-sharp writing, visceral honesty and irreverent confrontation with death make this an unforgettable and heartbreaking book of lasting importance. Thirty years after it was first published, we are so proud to be bringing this special book back to Serpent’s Tail – its brilliance should attract lots of attention and many new readers.”

Pre-order your copy

‘A feat of monumental thematic imagination’ – The New York Times

May 2021 Book of the Month for Roxane Gay’s Book Club

Coming of age as a free-born Black girl in Brooklyn after the Civil War, Libertie Sampson was all too aware that her purposeful mother, a practicing physician, had a vision for their future together: Libertie would go to medical school and practice alongside her. But Libertie, drawn more to music than science, feels stifled by her mother’s choices and is hungry for something else – is there really only one way to have an autonomous life? And she is constantly reminded that, unlike her mother who can pass, Libertie has skin that is too dark. When a young man from Haiti proposes to Libertie and promises she will be his equal on the island, she accepts, only to discover that she is still subordinate to him and all men. As she tries to parse what freedom actually means for a Black woman, Libertie struggles with where she might find it – for herself and for generations to come.

Libertie comes out on 29th April.

Pre-order your copy

Follow the author @SurlyBassey on Twitter

---

Se pa tout blesi ki geri

Not all wounds heal

1860

I saw my mother raise a man from the dead. “It still didn’t help him much, my love,” she told me. But I saw her do it all the same. That’s how I knew she was magic.

The time I saw Mama raise a man from the dead, it was close to dusk. Mama and her nurse, Lenore, were in her office—Mama with her little greasy glasses on the tip of her nose, balancing the books, and Lenore banking the fire. That was the rule in Mama’s office—the fire was kept burning from dawn till after dinner, and we never let it go out completely. Even on the hottest days, when my linen collar stuck to the back of my neck and the belly of Lenore’s apron was stained with sweat, a mess of logs and twigs was lit up down there, waiting.

When the dead man came, it was spring. I was playing on the stoop. I’d broken a stick off the mulberry bush, so young it had resisted the pull of my fist. I’d had to work for it. Once I’d wrenched it off, I stripped the bark and rubbed the wet wood underneath on the flagstone, pressing the green into rock.

I heard a rumbling come close and looked up, and I could see, down the road, a mule plodding slow and steady with a covered wagon, a ribbon of dust trailing behind it.

In those days, the road to our house was narrow and only just cut through the brush. Our house was set back—Grandfather, my mother’s father, had made his money raising pigs and kept the house and pens away from everyone else to protect his neighbors, and his reputation, from the undermining smell of swine. No one respects a man, no matter how rich and distinguished-looking, who stinks of pig scat. The house was set up on a rise, so we could always see who was coming. Usually, it was Mama’s patients, walking or limping or running to her office. Wagons were rare.

When it first turned onto our road, the cart was moving slowly. But once it passed the bowed-over walnut tree, the woman at the seat snapped her whip, and the mule began to move a little faster, until it was upon us.

“Where’s your mother?”

I opened my mouth, but before I could call for her, my mother rushed to the door, Lenore behind her.

“Quick,” was all Mama said, and the woman came down off the seat. A boy, about twelve or thirteen, followed. They were both dressed in mourning clothes. The woman’s skirt was full. Embroidered on the bodice of her dress were a dozen black lilies, done in cord. The boy’s mourning suit was dusty but perfectly fit to his form. At his neck was a velvet bow tie, come undone on the journey. The woman carried an enormous beaded handbag—it, too, was dusty but looked rich. It was covered in a thousand little eyes of jet that winked at me in the last bit of sun.

“Go, Lenore,” my mother said, and Lenore and the woman and the boy all went to the back of the wagon, the boy hopping up in the bed and pushing something that lay there, Lenore and the woman standing, arms ready to catch it. Finally, after much scraping, a coffin heaved out of the wagon bed. It was crudely made, a white, bright wood, heavy enough that Lenore and the woman stumbled as they carried it. When the coffin passed me, I could smell the sawdust still on it.

My mother stepped down off the stoop then, and the four of them lifted it up and managed it into the office. As soon as they got it inside, they set it on the ground and pushed it home. I could hear the rough pine shuffling across the floor.

“You’re early.” Mama struggled with the box. “Don’t start with me, Cathy,” the woman said, and Lenore looked up, and so did I. No one, except Grandfather before he died, dared call Mama “Cathy.” To everyone except for me, she was always “Doctor.” But Mama did not bristle and did not correct, as she would have with anyone else.

“Word was you’d be here at midnight.”

“We couldn’t leave,” the woman said. “He wasn’t ready.”

The woman knelt down in her dusty skirts and drew a long, skinny claw hammer from the handbag. She turned it on its head and began to pull at the nails on the coffin’s face. She grunted. “Here, Lucien.” She signaled to the boy. “Put some grease into it.” He fell down beside her, took the hammer from her hands, and began to pull at the nails she’d left behind.

Mama watched, eagerly. We all did. I crossed the room to stand beside her, slipped my hand into hers.

Mama started at my touch. “If you’d only come later.”

The woman’s head jerked up, her expression sharp, and then she looked at my hand in Mama’s, and her frown softened.

“I know we’ve done it differently. This time we really tried,” she said. “Besides, my Lucien sees all this and more. If you do this work, Cathy, your children will know sooner or later.”

This Monday 12th April bookshops in England and Wales are reopening! We can’t wait to be back among the books. Good job we’ve barely spent anything over the last few months of lockdown…

We love all bookshops, but have been overwhelmed by the support shown recently by queer bookshops for our Women’s Prize longlisted novel Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters.

To celebrate, we’re sharing a list of fantastic UK LGBT+ bookshops to shop with today.

Help share the word on Twitter.

QUEER LIT, MANCHESTER

 

 

 

Queer Lit started with 700 books but have now grown to stock over 1200 fabulous Queer titles. Follow them at @QueerLitUK

LIGHTHOUSE BOOKS, EDINBURGH

 

 

 

 

 

Lighthouse Bookshop is a queer-owned and woman led independent community bookshop based in Edinburgh. Follow them at @Lighthousebks

GAY’S THE WORD, LONDON

 

 

 

 

 

Gay’s The Word is the UK’s oldest LGBT bookshop, set up in January 1979 by a group of gay socialists as a community space where all profits were funnelled back into the business. This ethos continues today. Follow them at @GaystheWord.

CATEGORY IS BOOKS, GLASGOW

 

 

 

 

Category is Books was started by wusband and wusband team, Charlotte (they/them) and Fionn (‘Fin’) Duffy-Scott (they/them), who hope to create a space for the LGBTQIA+ community to learn about, be inspired by and share in our love of queer history, culture, writing and storytelling. Follow them at @CategoryisBooks.

PANED O GE, CARDIFF

 

 

 

 

 

Paned o Gê is an independent, queer bookshop, cafe, bar and event space in Cardiff; a social enterprise designed to highlight, promote and celebrate LGBTQ+ and Welsh talent and creators. Follow them at @panedoge

THE BOOKISH TYPE, LEEDS

 

 

 

 

 

The Bookish Type started out as pop-up bookstalls at events at various venues. The owners Ray and Nicola then set up a website and finally opened a bricks and mortar bookshop in September 2020. Follow them at @TypeLeeds

PORTAL BOOKSHOP, YORK

 

 

 

 

Portal Bookshop sells Science Fiction, Fantasy and all of the LGBTQIA books we can source from the UK, the US and beyond. Follow them @PortalBookshop

SHELFLIFE BOOKS & ZINES, CARDIFF

 

 

 

 

 

Shelflife Books & Zines is a not-for-profit radical bookshop in Cardiff working with independent publishers and DIY zine-makers to make space for marginalised and under-represented voices. Follow them @ShelflifeCdf

We at Serpent’s Tail would like to thank the Women’s Prize and the literary community for their support for our extraordinarily talented author Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. In the past 48 hours we have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of love for Torrey’s brilliant, timely and original book. Detransition, Baby is closely concerned with the things cis and trans women have in common and what they can teach one another, and it is beautiful to see such heartfelt and thoughtful responses to its message of solidarity. We abhor bullying and personal attacks on writers and are very grateful to everyone who has taken the time to state their support for Torrey, for trans people more generally and to celebrate the vitality of women’s writing.

We’re so glad that this remarkable novel will reach even more readers as a result of the increased attention. Particularly heartening are the efforts of queer and feminist bookshops including QueerLit, the Second Shelf, Lighthouse Books and others in promoting Torrey’s novel and donating money to trans-led organisations. We see and appreciate all of the generous individuals who have taken part in pay-it-forward schemes to purchase copies for others who want to read Detransition, Baby. Thank you also to everyone who has amplified our giveaways and recommended this very special novel to their friends and loved ones. As a result of all your kindness and enthusiasm, we are going into our third reprinting of the novel.

All our thanks and lots of love from Serpent’s Tail

We couldn’t be more delighted that Carmen Maria Machado has won the prestigious Rathbones Folio Prize 2021 with her ground-breaking memoir In the Dream House.

The judges called it ‘A breathtakingly inventive, unflinchingly honest examination of domestic abuse in a female relationship’.

Tracing her relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado breaks down the idea of what the memoir form can do and be – and approaches a subject for which literary treatment has been extremely rare.

In a unanimous decision, the judges Roger Robinson, Sinéad Gleeson and Jon McGregor deemed In the Dream House the best book on what was a strong and widely discussed 2021 shortlist, also containing novels, auto-fiction, poetry, and poetry with photography.

Sinéad Gleeson said: “Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is an exceptional, important book. It takes everything a reader expects from a memoir, and upends and deconstructs it, playing with the possibilities of the form. Machado explores queerness, domestic violence and bodies in a
multi-genre masterpiece, told in taut, stunning prose.”

Find out more at the Rathbones Folio Prize website

Buy your copy

Follow @carmenmmachado

We are completely beside ourselves to be publishing Booth, Karen Joy Fowler’s first novel since the international phenomenon We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves!

Karen Joy Fowler’s 2014 novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves has sold 900,000 copies in the UK across all formats and was one of the bestselling novels of 2014. It was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize and won the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.  

Karen Joy Fowler said, ‘I’m thrilled to be working again with the wonderful team at Serpent’s Tail. They’ve been very patient as this book was a long time coming — current events continually drawing my attention away from historical ones. But those long ago issues remain relevant and the Booths proved a particularly useful lens through which to tell a story about family, fame, and the Civil War. Plus lots of Shakespeare.’

commissioning editor Rebecca Gray said, ‘How do you follow up the book of a lifetime? For Karen, the answer is by writing another masterpiece. This is an utterly different book to We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, but it’s just as imaginative, thought-provoking and resonant. It takes a story we think we know and turns it inside out, creating a novel that is historically and politically serious, and an absolute pleasure to read, too. The characters feel alive on the page, the setting is beautifully done, and once again Karen finds a voice that rises off the page. This is a deep dive into history that shows how Britain and the US have intertwined stories, and how the past casts long shadows into the present. When I began reading the book I wondered if it was her Wolf Hall, and by the end I knew that it was.’

ABOUT BOOTH:

Booth is the magisterial, vivid and tragic story of a family who changed the course of American history. Junius is a famous and charismatic English actor, and self-styled rival to Edmund Kean who thrills America with his renditions of Shakespeare, when he isn’t drunk and sinking the family ever further into debt. Growing up in nineteenth century rural Maryland, his children become intimately familiar with hardship, early death and the horrors of slavery. Of the six Booth siblings who survive to adulthood, each one has their own dreams they must fight to realise – but it is Johnny who makes the terrible decision that will ensure their names are known to this day.

ABOUT KAREN JOY FOWLER:

Karen Joy Fowler is the author of seven previous novels including The Jane Austen Book Club and three short story collections. Her most recent novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014, won the PEN/Faulkner Prize 2014 and has sold over a million copies globally. She lives in California, USA. www.karenjoyfowler.com

Press contact: Anna-Marie Fitzgerald – Senior Publicity Manager – [email protected]

@SerpentsTail on Twitter and Instagram

The Last House on Needless Street is finally out!

We know you all have many questions for Catriona Ward, author of The Last House On Needless Street. Everything from the gripping plot twists that no one sees coming, to the intricacy of the characters that readers are coming to love. Today, we’re delighted to share this Q&A our lovely editor Miranda did with Catriona. Read on to get the scoop.

1. Everyone who has read The Last House on Needless Street raves about all the many twists and turns. Did you plan them in detail, or write furiously and edit afterwards? 

I knew where the book had to end up, so I wrote my way furiously towards that. It was like spinning a vast spiderweb. Each plot thread was integral yet interconnected to a hundred others, and each change affected and reverberated through the whole. It felt impossible at times but I just had to believe it would come together. And some of the most satisfying twists were the ones I discovered as I wrote.

2. A character in The Last House on Needless Street who has become an early reader favourite is the snooty cat, Olivia. Is she a complete creation, or is she based on a real cat?  

Growing up, I had a black cat called Velvet. She was born in Kenya, and came with us when we moved to Madagascar, the US, Yemen, Morocco and finally the UK where she passed away peacefully at the age of 19. Whenever I opened a book she would appear and curl up next to me. I spent most of my childhood reading – so we spent a lot of time together. I think Olivia is very much her own cat, however. As I was planning the book she strolled in from nowhere, as cats tend to do. She was already very full of opinions.

3. The Last House on Needless Street is quite different to your two previous novels, Rawblood and Little Eve, which were more straight historical gothic. Why did you decide to write a modern gothic thriller? 

I was born in the US and lived there as a child. I wanted to mine new areas of experience for this book – my US background, my lifelong fascination with serial killers and those wild forests of Washington State. It felt like time to push my boundaries as a writer and turn my love of the gothic to something strange and altogether different.

4. Who are the writers who most inspire you, and whose work you return to again and again? 

Kelly Link makes the magical seem everyday, and vice versa. I always leave her work enriched. Shirley Jackson understands that sometimes it’s the mundane that terrifies, rather than the monstrous. Growing up, Stephen King was my gateway to horror. His writing was a huge influence and still lives in my imagination today.

5. Can you tell us something about your next book, Sundial?

A mother takes her teenage daughter on a bonding trip to her abandoned childhood home, Sundial, which sits in the great expanses of the Mojave desert in Southern California. Each thinks the other is planning to murder her out there. It sounds sinister, and it is – but it’s also about compassion, sacrifice, and the complicated love that can hold families together.

---

Catriona Ward was born in Washington, DC and grew up in the US, Kenya, Madagascar, Yemen, and Morocco. Her debut Rawblood won Best Horror Novel at the 2016 British Fantasy Awards, and was a WHSmith Fresh Talent title. Little Eve won the Shirley Jackson Award, was a Guardian best book of 2018 and won the Best Horror Novel at the 2019 British Fantasy Awards. She lives in London and Devon.

You can follow Catriona Ward on Twitter here and Miranda Jewess on Twitter here.

We’re delighted to share that Andy Serkis and Jonathan Cavendish’s Imaginarium Productions have optioned film rights to Catriona Ward’s highly anticipated new novel, The Last House On Needless Street.

We will be publishing in the UK on 18th March 2021 and Tor Nightfire will publish in the US in late September. Ward will executive produce alongside the Imaginarium. The book is Ward’s third novel, following her gothic horror debut, Rawblood (2015) and Little Eve (2018), which both won the August Derleth Prize at the British Fantasy Awards, making Ward the first and only woman to win the prize twice.

Little Eve also won the 2019 Shirley Jackson Award, establishing Ward as the new face of literary dark fiction. The Last House On Needless Street follows Ted, who lives with his daughter Lauren and his cat Olivia in an ordinary house at the end of an ordinary street. But an unspeakable secret binds them together, and when a new neighbor moves in next door, what is buried out among the birch trees behind their house will come back to haunt them all.

The book is receiving rave reviews and counts Stephen King amongst its fans: “I’ve read it and was blown away. It’s a true nerve shredder that keeps its mind-blowing secrets to the very end. Haven’t read anything this exciting since Gone Girl”.

Catriona Ward has been thrilled with the news, sharing: “From the very first, I was bowled over by the Imaginarium team – their passion, their dedication and thoughtful approach to this book. I know that ‘The Last House on Needless Street‘ is in the best possible hands, and I can’t wait to start working with them to bring the mysterious world of Needless Street to life on film”.

In a statement from Andy Serkis: “This is the kind of book you come across once in a lifetime and I’m incredibly excited that Catriona has chosen to collaborate with Imaginarium to bring her spectacular novel to the screen”.

The deal was negotiated by Michael Dean at Andrew Nurnberg Associates. Imaginarium Productions recently wrapped production on the supernatural horror No One Gets Out Alive for Netflix and are in post-production on Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins for Searchlight.

@imaginariumproductions
www.imaginariumuk.com

We couldn’t be more thrilled that Torrey Peters’ DETRANSITION, BABY has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021!

The Women’s Prize for Fiction – one of the biggest annual, international celebrations of women’s creativity – today announces the 2021 longlist. Now in its 26th year, the Prize shines a spotlight on outstanding, ambitious, original fiction written in English by women from anywhere in the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ABOUT THE BOOK

‘Irresistible … Detransition, Baby is the first great trans realist novel‘ Grace Lavery, Guardian
‘A voraciously knowing, compulsively readable novel’ Chris Kraus
‘Tremendously funny and sexy as hell’ Juliet Jacques

Reese nearly had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York, a job she didn’t hate. She’d scraped together a life previous generations of trans women could only dream of; the only thing missing was a child. Then everything fell apart and three years on Reese is still in self-destruct mode, avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.

When her ex calls to ask if she wants to be a mother, Reese finds herself intrigued. After being attacked in the street, Amy de-transitioned to become Ames, changed jobs and, thinking he was infertile, started an affair with his boss Katrina. Now Katrina’s pregnant. Could the three of them form an unconventional family – and raise the baby together?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Torrey Peters lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Masters in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth. She is the author of two novellas, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker. @torreypeters

THE LONGLIST

The sixteen longlisted books are as follows:

Because of You by Dawn French
Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
Consent by Annabel Lyon
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan
How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones
Luster by Raven Leilani
No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
Nothing But Blue Sky by Kathleen MacMahon
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers
Summer by Ali Smith
The Golden Rule by Amanda Craig
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller

The judging panel – which is made up of podcaster, author and journalist, Elizabeth Day; TV and radio presenter, journalist and writer, Vick Hope; print columnist and writer, Nesrine Malik; and news presenter and broadcaster, Sarah-Jane Mee – will whittle these 16 books down to a shortlist of just 6 novels, announced on April 28th. The 25th winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction will be announced on Wednesday 7th July.

Find out more over at the Women’s Prize for Fiction

Serpent’s Tail turns a very respectable 35 years old this year and while for our 30^th we danced in a sweaty industrial bunker behind Angel station until the early hours of a weekday morning, for our birthday this year – like everyone else – we’re celebrating from home.

We’ve teamed up with Carrie Plitt and Octavia Bright, podcasters of exquisite taste and style and hosts of the award-winning Literary Friction to bring you the very special one-off minisode Inside Publishing with Hannah Westland from Serpent’s Tail. Hannah Westland, Serpent’s Tail’s publisher since 2012, chats about the history, present and future of the imprint and what it means to be an independent publisher in 2021.

Listen on all platforms, including:

Acast

Spotify

Apple

You can hear Literary Friction’s previous interviews with our authors here: Carmen Maria Machado, Mary Gaitskill, Yelena Moskovich, Esi Edugyan, Sarah Perry and find out more about the books discussed at our bookshop.org page. Look out for more birthday news and giveaways later this spring. #ST35

You can trust us to publish books by, for and about dissenting women. Women who strive for change, who refuse to conform, who offer us a brand new way of looking at the world. In our picks below meet Libertie, Reese, Kim, the Essex Girl, Yona, the Black women and girls of 20th century America, and Nina.

Tell us who you’re reading for International Women’s Day – @serpentstail.

---

LIBERTIE
Kaitlyn Greenidge

Coming of age as a free-born Black girl in Brooklyn after the Civil War, Libertie Sampson was all too aware that her purposeful mother, a practicing physician, had a vision for their future together: Libertie would go to medical school and practice alongside her. But Libertie, drawn more to music than science, feels stifled by her mother’s choices and is hungry for something else – is there really only one way to have an autonomous life? And she is constantly reminded that, unlike her mother who can pass, Libertie has skin that is too dark. When a young man from Haiti proposes to Libertie and promises she will be his equal on the island, she accepts, only to discover that she is still subordinate to him and all men. As she tries to parse what freedom actually means for a Black woman, Libertie struggles with where she might find it – for herself and for generations to come.

Get your copy

---

DETRANSITION, BABY
Torrey Peters

Reese nearly had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York, a job she didn’t hate. She’d scraped together a life previous generations of trans women could only dream of; the only thing missing was a child. Then everything fell apart and three years on Reese is still in self-destruct mode, avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.

When her ex calls to ask if she wants to be a mother, Reese finds herself intrigued. After being attacked in the street, Amy de-transitioned to become Ames, changed jobs and, thinking he was infertile, started an affair with his boss Katrina. Now Katrina’s pregnant. Could the three of them form an unconventional family – and raise the baby together?

Get your copy

---

CALL ME MUMMY
Tina Baker
(Viper Books)

THIS MOTHER’S DAY YOU WILL CALL HER MUMMY

Glamorous, beautiful Mummy has everything a woman could want. Except for a daughter of her very own. So when she sees Kim – heavily pregnant, glued to her phone and ignoring her eldest child in a busy shop – she does what anyone would do. She takes her. But foul-mouthed little Tonya is not the daughter that Mummy was hoping for.

As Tonya fiercely resists Mummy’s attempts to make her into the perfect child, Kim is demonised by the media as a ‘scummy mummy’, who deserves to have her other children taken too. Haunted by memories of her own childhood and refusing to play by the media’s rules, Kim begins to spiral, turning on those who love her.

Though they are worlds apart, Mummy and Kim have more in common than they could possibly imagine. But it is five-year-old Tonya who is caught in the middle…

Get your copy

---

ESSEX GIRLS
Sarah Perry

Essex Girls are disreputable, disrespectful and disobedient.
They speak out of turn, too loudly and too often, in an accent irritating to the ruling classes.
Their bodies are hyper-sexualised and irredeemably vulgar.
They are given to intricate and voluble squabbling.
They do not apologise for any of this. And why should they?

In this exhilarating feminist defence of the Essex girl, Sarah Perry re-examines her relationship with her much maligned home county. She summons its most unquiet spirits, from Protestant martyr Rose Allin to the indomitable Abolitionist Anne Knight, sitting them alongside Audre Lorde, Kim Kardashian and Harriet Martineau, and showing us that the Essex girl is not bound by geography. She is a type, representing a very particular kind of female agency, and a very particular kind of disdain: she contains a multitude of women, and it is time to celebrate them.

Get your copy

---

THE DISASTER TOURIST
Yun Ko-Eun

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

---

WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS
Saidiya Hartman

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.

These women refused to labour like slaves. 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.

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman deploys both radical scholarship and profound literary intelligence to examine the transformation of intimate life that they instigated. With visionary intensity, she conjures their worlds, their dilemmas, their defiant brilliance.

Get your copy

 

---

GOOD MORNING, DESTROYER OF MEN’S SOULS
Nina Renata Aron

‘The disease he has is addiction,’ Nina Renata Aron writes of her boyfriend. ‘The disease I have is loving him.’ Their affair is dramatic, urgent – an intoxicating antidote to the lonely days of early motherhood. But soon, K starts using again. Even as his addiction deepens, she stays, thinking she can save him. It’s a familiar pattern, developed in an adolescence marred by family trauma – how can she break it? If she leaves, has she failed?

Have you wondered what inspired the author, Tina Baker, to write about stealing a child? Or maybe you’ve thought about how much of her own self she poured into her characters?

Or, you’re just itching to know what Tina’s next book is? (You and us both!).

Find all the answers, and more, below.

1. Call Me Mummy is your debut novel, and previously you spent years working in TV. What made you decide to start writing?
I’ve always written. At school I’d write stories and poems for myself, not just in English lessons. I kept it secret. It didn’t do to seem soft back there, back then. I was hit on the head with a chair when I entered a Cadbury’s chocolate writing competition. To add insult to actual injury, I didn’t win. I always wanted to write a novel but couldn’t find the time or head space to write fiction when I was a journalist. When my dad died, I finally decided to go for it and did my MA in Creative Writing at City University.

2. The characters of Kim and Mummy are so vivid, both flawed and relatable. Are they based on anyone in real life? Are there parts of your own personality in there?
The three main characters are all parts of me. Don’t hate me! Obviously, I’ve exaggerated because I haven’t actually stolen a child. Honest! I empathise with both Kim and Mummy, although I’m mainly Tonya. Kim’s friend Ayesha is based on the ladies I taught to keep fit at Finsbury Park Mosque.

3. In Call Me Mummy you explore how the media can turn on women who don’t conform to the ideals of motherhood. Why did you decide to include it in the novel?
I was horrified by the treatment of Madeleine McCann’s parents. As if losing a child’s not the worst thing in the world, you’re then crucified in the press. I never did much news reporting as a journalist, but I’ve read stuff that chills my blood. Even if the story’s balanced, people remember headline quotes like ‘Scummy Mummy’ which can ruin someone’s life. Woman can’t win in the media. We’re too fat, too thin, too confident, too bolshy— slammed for being a working mum or a stay-at-home mum. A man can turn up to the school gates with coke up his nose and a hooker on his arm and it’s like, ‘Bless! He’s come to collect the kids.’

4. Which crime writers most inspire you? Is there a book that you want to recommend to everyone?
I confess, I hadn’t read much crime until I was told I was a crime writer. Not one single Agatha Christie. Please don’t stone me in the street. I’ve now read a lot of my Viper colleagues’ work. Dave Jackson makes me laugh, Janice Hallett challenges my brain, Catriona Ward hooks my emotions. Shuggie Bain is the book that most touched me recently. The working class/underclass experience is very close to my heart. Not crime? What Thatcher did to Shuggie’s community was a bloody crime.

5. Can you tell us something about your next book? No spoilers!
Nasty Little Cuts explores those small niggles, resentments and cruelties that build and build within relationships, and then in highly charged situations like Christmas can erupt into something horrific. Bridget Jones meets Jack Reacher.

---

Tina Baker was brought up in a caravan after her mother, a fairground traveller, fell pregnant by a window cleaner. After leaving the bright lights of Coalville, she came to London and worked as a journalist and broadcaster for thirty years. She’s probably best known as a television critic for the BBC and GMTV. Call Me Mummy is Tina’s first novel.

You can follow the brilliant Tina Baker here.

We are immensely excited to announce that we will publish LIBERTIE, the acclaimed second novel by American novelist and New York Times contributing writer Kaitlyn Greenidge.

LIBERTIE is the Roxane Gay Audacious Book Club pick for May 2021 and was named one of the most-anticipated books of the year by O, The Oprah Magazine, The Millions, Refinery29, Publishers Lunch, BuzzFeed, The Rumpus, BookPage and Harper’s Bazaar. The novel’s many fans include Jacqueline Woodson, Brandon Taylor, Garth Greenwell and Nafissa Thompson-Squires.

The novel is set in a richly-imagined 19^th century New York and Haiti and was inspired by the fascinating life of Dr Susan Smith McKinney Steward, one of the first Black female doctors in the United States.

Kaitlyn Greenidge: ‘I am so excited to publish LIBERTIE with Serpent’s Tail. I feel honored to join the ranks of the brilliant writers they publish and I’m looking forward to the conversations I hope this novel will spark with readers.’

Rebecca Gray: ‘I’ve loved Kaitlyn Greenidge’s work since I read WE LOVE YOU, CHARLIE FREEMAN, so I’m thrilled she is joining Serpent’s Tail for LIBERTIE. It’s a stunning book about freedom, race, the hopes we have for our children and how history resonates through generations. We can’t wait to publish this historical novel by a star of contemporary fiction.’

Follow Kaitlyn @SurlyBassey on Twitter

Pre-order your copy at Bookshop.org, Waterstones or Amazon

ABOUT LIBERTIE:

Coming of age as a free-born Black girl in Brooklyn after the Civil War, Libertie Sampson was all too aware that her purposeful mother, a practising physician, had a vision for their future together: Libertie would go to medical school and practise alongside her. But Libertie, drawn more to music than science, feels stifled by her mother’s choices and is hungry for something else – is there really only one way to have an autonomous life? As she tries to work out what freedom actually means for a Black woman, Libertie struggles with where she might find it – for herself and for generations to come.

A NOTE ON THE COVER IMAGE

The striking cover portrait of an unidentified young Southern woman was suggested by Kaitlyn and is one of the historical artefacts that inspired LIBERTIE. It is from the Hugh Mangum archive at Duke University, a cache of negatives discovered in the photographer’s barn in the 1970s. They were taken between 1890 to 1922 in North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia and offer a unique survey of society at the time, cutting across race, class, and gender lines.

ABOUT KAITLYN GREENIDGE:

Kaitlyn Greenidge’s debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books) was one of the New York Times Critics’ Top 10 Books of 2016. She has written for Vogue, Glamour and the Wall Street Journal, was a contributing editor for LENNY Letter and is currently a contributing writer for the New York Times. She has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and runs a popular newsletter. She tweets @surlybassey.

 

PRAISE FOR LIBERTIE:

‘This is one of the most thoughtful and amazingly beautiful books I’ve read all year. Kaitlyn Greenidge is a master storyteller.’ Jacqueline Woodson, author of Red at the Bone

‘In this singular novel, Kaitlyn Greenidge confronts the anonymizing forces of history with her formidable gifts. LIBERTIE is a glorious, piercing song for the ages—fierce, brilliant, and utterly free.’
Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life

‘Kaitlyn Greenidge has built a lush, imaginative novel, as dark and beautiful as its namesake yet as relevant today as during its 19th-century setting. I didn’t want it to end, and I fear that any attempt to render its complexity with brevity equals a failure to capture the book’s vast depth and its conversation with so many other important historical and literary works. A page turner and a gorgeous winner.’ Nafissa Thompson-Spires, author of Heads of the Colored People

‘The voice that fuels this novel is rooted in the body and rises toward myth, forged of history, ocean salt, iron, and hope. With LIBERTIE, Kaitlyn Greenidge adds an indelible new sound to American literature, and confirms her status as one of our most gifted young writers.’ Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You and Cleanness

 

We’ve had news of the series coming for a while but more exciting news is here – Claire Danes has been cast as Cora, the leading role, and Tom Hiddleston as Will!

In The Essex Serpent, newly widowed Cora (Danes), having being released from an abusive marriage, relocates from Victorian London to the small village of Aldwinter in Essex, intrigued by a local superstition that a mythical creature known as the Essex Serpent has returned to the area.

Claire Danes is an Emmy, Golden Globe and SAG Award-winner (“Homeland,” “Temple Grandin”).  The series will be directed by Clio Barnard (“The Selfish Giant,” “The Arbor”). Anna Symon (“Deep Water,” “Mrs Wilson”) will serve as lead writer. Jamie Laurenson, Hakan Kousetta, Patrick Walters, Iain Canning, Emile Sherman will executive produce the show alongside Clio Barnard and Anna Symon. Andrea Cornwell will serve as producer.

The Essex Serpent will be produced for Apple TV+ by See-Saw Films, and is commissioned for Apple out of the UK by Apple’s Heads of Worldwide Video, Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, and Creative Director for Europe Worldwide Video, Jay Hunt.

 Find out more at Variety

Buy your copy of The Essex Serpent