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The Garnet Inheritance
Karen Lewis
Literary historical fiction · 9th-century Wessex
She was the mother of Alfred the Great. History gave her one paragraph. This novel asks what the rest of her life looked like.
In 9th-century Wessex, Osburh is barred by law from the title of queen. Her Jutish ancestry, the white earth people of the Isle of Wight, must be hidden from the Saxon court that will define her life. She will bear the secret weight of a buried garnet brooch against her skin through every public ceremony the kingdom demands.
She will build her marriage from a single provisional decision made beside a dying fire. She will teach her youngest son, small, sickly, overlooked, that power does not always wear a crown. That son is Alfred.
Spanning three generations from the chalk downs of Vectis to the gilded trap of Winchester, The Garnet Inheritance traces a hidden ancestry that begins two generations before Osburh is born, with a Jutish farmer hiding grain beneath a Roman mosaic floor, and the long chain of survival and silence that leads, eventually, to Alfred’s throne.
For readers of
Wolf Hall · Hamnet · Matrix · The Buried Giant · The Marriage Portrait
Available now as an ebook and paperback.
Coming from Little Dog Books
Forthcoming titles
The Gap Life
Forthcoming
Contemporary literary fiction
At fifty-one, Lauren walks out of a long marriage and two grown daughters and flies east with no plan and no date of return.
A Welsh consultant anaesthetist, she moves through Thailand, Laos, India, later Sydney and South America, while the life she left reorganises itself without her. The Gap Life is a novel about flight and accountability, about the woman who runs and what it costs the people she runs from. It refuses the redemption arc. The peace it reaches is earned rather than given: cold tea going to habit, and a kind of quiet that is not the same as forgiveness.
For readers of Outline · Dept. of Speculation · Olive Kitteridge
Four Hours
Forthcoming
Contemporary literary fiction · West Virginia
Caleb Moran is thirty-four, divorced, estranged from his son, starting from zero. A former state wrestling champion from the McDowell County coalfields, fifteen years into a losing fight with addiction.
Four Hours is a novel about what recovery looks like from the inside: not a clean arc but a series of provisional decisions made in motel rooms, scrapyards, and church basements. The four hours of the title are the ones he has to cross on the first morning, between the last pill and the moment the clinic opens. It is a book about the arithmetic of staying, what it costs and what makes it worth it.
For readers of Winter’s Bone · Demon Copperhead · The Wrestler
Ghost Ships
Forthcoming
Historical noir · Victorian Liverpool
Three lives cross on the Liverpool waterfront: a detective tracing a run of impossible deaths, a labourer who reads the memory held in cargo, a woman who works the foreshore at low tide.
What they uncover runs from the Liverpool cotton wharves to the slave coast of West Africa to the cleared estates of post-Famine Ireland, a single circuit of commerce that made one man untouchably rich. Ghost Ships is a literary novel about the weight history carries in objects, and what happens when a roomful of people who have never had to feel that weight are finally made to.
For readers of The Essex Serpent · Fingersmith · The North Water
The Jade Emperor’s Shadow
Forthcoming
Historical fiction · Imperial China
Twin princes are born to the Ming Emperor on a night of blood and lightning. The court astrologers call it a curse: the sky cannot hold two suns.
One boy is raised to rule. The other is smuggled out of the Forbidden City before dawn, left at a mountain monastery with no name and no history, and grows into a monk who does not know his hands once reached for an empire. Thirty-two years later, a conspiracy of broken men will seat him on his brother’s throne for three days, just long enough to show the empire what mercy looks like.
For readers of Wolf Hall · The Garden of Evening Mists · How Much of These Hills Is Gold
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