My fellow booklings,
A lot has been going on here at Deixis Press, though I haven’t told you about it, so you’d be forgiven for thinking I’ve simply been spending my days rolling around on the sweet sweet piles of cash that independent presses rake in.
Item the FIRST! Chloe Turner, author of the gorgeous Blue Hawk, about which many of you have raved (and currently just £10 direct from the press!), has a new book coming out on 27 August! A Calamity of Waters is set during the Bristol Channel floods of 1607.
JANUARY 1607. THE SEVERN VALLEY. THE GREATEST FLOOD IN LIVING MEMORY.
Habren has never quite forgiven herself. Her father only sings bawdy carols for farthings these days, none of the sweet songs he used to sing their mother, and perhaps it’s no wonder her sisters Syble and Margret have put many leagues between themselves and their old home. But then Syble summons her to Gloucester, and if Habren can keep on the right side of their pin merchant master, perhaps it’s the chance she needs to make up for the past.
Then the river rises. In a single January morning, the Severn floods the vale and upends every life in it. And somewhere down that swollen estuary is Ambrose, the man Habren loves.
With Syble and new friend Raynould beside her, Habren sets out for Bristol to find him, through a city the flood has torn apart. And as they search, secrets they have kept close to their hearts begin, one by one, to surface.
Chloe says that all of her profits from A Calamity of Waters will go to the Stroud Valleys Project for river restoration work.
Item the SECOND! Siôn Scott-Wilson’s third and final book in the Sammy & Facey series, What Mortal Flesh, is coming out on 24 September!
1848. A bad year to be poor, and a worse one to be Irish.
It has been sixteen years since Sammy and Facey hoisted their last corpse. Sammy keeps a quiet Portsmouth tap-room, and Facey hosts his own Soho tavern. But when an Irish widow's body is spirited from her bed at St Thomas' hospital, the two erstwhile resurrection men are dragged back into the cadaver trade.
As Sammy's daughter Lily steps into a future of her own, and old enemies they assumed long gone prove very much alive, Sammy and Facey come to a final reckoning. What will it cost two old grave robbers to bury the dead for good?
Siôn’s first book in the series, Some Rise By Sin, was the first Deixis Press book, so (along with Richard Gadz) Siôn suffered from my mistakes and inexperience in working out the way to get books in front of people.
This means that I’m aiming to get the whole series in front of a new set of readers. One way I’m doing that is with a Bookstagram tour through the whole series. New readers are starting now with Some Rise By Sin and they are LOVING it. Please check out the creators below on Instagram.
Item the THIRD! Marc Joan has a long, looooong list of well-deserved short story awards and nominations. Now we are bringing some of those acclaimed stories together in one place: Smorgasbord, out 29 October.
WHAT DO WE OWE THE STRANGER? WHAT DO WE OWE THE DEAD?
A Japanese man paints a second eye on a doll. A widow holds an injured gull to her chest and cries by the sea. A grieving child climbs a stack of pallets to send a lantern into the sky. A chess player forfeits a game he was winning. A man places three red tulips on a grave.
Marc Joan's critically acclaimed short fiction spans Geneva and San Francisco, Cornwall and Cambridge, Wales and India, the very old and the not-so-old – and the distances between the people who live in them.
Written with delicacy and the occasional dark twist, Smorgasbord is about what we carry across borders – grief, memory, guilt, old age – and what we leave behind.
Marc and Chloe are also having Instagram tours for their books; please watch the Deixis Press Instagram for more details on those if I get distracted by all my riches again and fail to post here.
Item the FOURTH and perhaps the BESTH: We are having a London launch party for all of the above (plus my own book*, plus a reading from Adam Saint ahead of his own second book out next year) on Friday 25 September. Please come! RSVP here so I know you’re coming.
Yours,
Angel
* Reviews of their own books are never any author’s business, but I looked at mine anyway and people seem to like it. Why not try it for yourself?
"you’d be forgiven for thinking I’ve simply been spending my days rolling around on the sweet sweet piles of cash that independent presses rake in." - 😂😂😂 Seriously though, these books sound so good. If I didn't have another event book I'd have come to the launch on 25th September 📚