Fiction

‘Ravishingly beautiful’ Observer
‘Excruciatingly honest and yet vibrantly creative’ Irish Times
‘Provocative and rich’ Economist
‘Daring, chilling, and unlike anything else you’ve ever read’ Esquire
‘An absolute must-read’ Stylist

WINNER OF THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2021

‘A masterpiece. Proceed with caution’ Phoebe Bridgers

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

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

Read more

‘I’m not exaggerating when I say this novel challenged everything I thought I knew about love and friendship. It’s one of those books that stays with you forever.’ – Dua Lipa

The million-copy bestseller, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, by the author of To Paradise and The People in the Trees, is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance.

Winner of Fiction of the Year at the British Book Awards
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize
Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize
Finalist for the US National Book Award for Fiction

When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity.

Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome – but that will define his life forever.

‘Yanagihara takes you so deeply into the lives and minds of these characters that you struggle to leave them behind.’ – The Times

Read more

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

An intimate, emotionally rich novel, in which two men – young and old – reckon with queer histories and their place within them, from the critically acclaimed author of We the Animals

Juan Gay is on his deathbed. He has decided to spend his last days in The Palace: a monumental, fading institution in the desert, which was an asylum in another lifetime. There, a young man tends to this dying soul – someone who Juan met only once, but who has haunted the edges of his life ever since.

As the end approaches, the two trade stories – resurrecting lost loves, lives, mothers and fathers – and their lives are woven, ineluctably, into a broader story of pathology and oppression. Charged with sifting through Juan’s belongings, our narrator uncovers a copy of Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, its pages blacked out, censored, reduced down to poetic dispatches. And, as he sifts through the manuscript, another story is told: that of Jan Gay – a radical, queer anthropologist – whose ground-breaking work was co-opted, and stifled, by the committee she served.

Blackouts is a haunting, dreamlike rumination on memory and erasure, blending fact with fiction – drawing from historical records, screenplays, testimony and image – to force us to look again at the world we have inherited and the narratives we have received.

Read more

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER! The blockbuster danmei/Boys’ Love novels from China that inspired the animated series! This epic historical fantasy about a prince and the mysterious man by his side is now officially in English, for the very first time! Born the crown prince of a prosperous kingdom, Xie Lian was renowned for his beauty, strength, and purity. His years of dedication and noble deeds allowed him to ascend to godhood. But those who rise, can also fall…and fall he does, cast from the Heavens again and again and banished to the mortal realm. Eight hundred years after his mortal life, Xie Lian has ascended to godhood for the third time. Now only a lowly scrap collector, he is dispatched to wander the earthly realm to take on tasks appointed by the heavens to pay back debts and maintain his divinity. Aided by old friends and foes alike, and graced with the company of a mysterious young man with whom he feels an instant connection, Xie Lian must confront the horrors of his past in order to dispel the curse of his present. The Seven Seas English-language edition will include covers from 日出的小太陽 (tai3_3), and exclusive, all-new interior illustrations from ZeldaCW.

Read more

‘A fantastically moody, unsettling novel, with a teasing, enigmatic atmosphere entirely its own’ SARAH WATERS
‘Intensely lyrical and powerfully haunting… Sublime storytelling and Gothic fiction at its very best!’ SUSAN STOKES-CHAPMAN
‘A novel about wild, dissident passion, the profound dislocations of grief, and the intoxication of composition’ NAOMI BOOTH
‘A beautiful, hallucinatory dream of a novel’ J.M. MIRO

__________

There is a beast inside her, a monster. It wants to scream, it wants to tear things apart.

1816. Mary, eighteen years old, is staying in a villa on Lake Geneva with her lover Percy Shelley. She is tormented by his infidelities; haunted by the loss of her baby daughter.

Then one evening with friends, as storms rage outside and laudanum stirs their imaginations, Lord Byron challenges everyone to write a ghost story, and something fierce and wild awakens in Mary.

Memories surface of the long, strange summer she once spent with a family in Scotland, where she found herself falling in love with the enigmatic Isabella Baxter. She learned tales of mythical beasts, witches and spirits. And she encountered real monsters – both in the rocky wilds, and far, far closer to home…

Illuminating the past like a flash of lightning, this brilliant reimagining of the birth of Frankenstein takes us into a feverish world of waking dreams-where grief mingles with desire, and the veil between beauty and horror grows thin.

__________

PRAISE FOR FOR MARY

‘Like reading a laudanum dram’ ANNIE GARTHWAITE, author of Cecily
‘Rich, intricate and beguiling, this is a novel of enormous insight, great heart and incredible skill’ NELL STEVENS
‘A novel that tiptoes and whispers, woos and caresses like the darkest of fairytales’ JOANNE BURN, author of The Hemlock Cure
‘A literary creation story as bold, terrifying, and riveting as Frankenstein itself’ LAURIE LICO ALBANESE
‘A lyrical dream of a book that strays into the nightmarish, the gothic and the eerie with an assured elegance’ ELIZABETH LEE, author of Cunning Women
‘Mary reveals the rich inner life of one of the world’s greatest creative imaginations’ Sarah Sheridan
‘Creative confirmation of Shelley’s position as the mother of all goth girls. A moody and evocative reveal of the backstory (behind the backstory) of Frankenstein’ KIRKUS
‘A nuanced, beautifully atmospheric portrayal of a young woman’s intense inner life, foreshadowing Frankenstein’s themes of grief, loneliness, and the desire for love’ BOOKLIST

Read more