Honeyeater - Kathleen Jennings

A richly imagined dark fantasy that pulses with the beautiful destruction of a town reclaimed by the natural world.

Sub-tropical Bellworth is founded on floodplains and root-bound secrets. And Charlie, remarkable only for vanished friends and a successful sister, plans to leave for good, just as soon as he deals with his dead aunt’s house. Then Grace arrives, desperate, with roses pressing up through her skin, and drags Charlie into the ghost-choked mysteries of Bellworth, uncovering the impossible consequences of loss and desire — and a choice Charlie made when he was a boy.

But peeling back the rumors and lies that cocoon the suburb disturbs more than complacent neighbors and lost souls. And Charlie and Grace are forced to a decision that threatens not only their lives, but all they believed those lives could be.

Kathleen Jennings lives in Brisbane, Australia, a subtropical city.

Her Australian Gothic debut, Flyaway, (set in Western Queensland, where she grew up) received a British Fantasy Award (the Sydney J. Bounds Award) and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. She is also the author of a short story collection, Kindling, and a poetry collection, Travelogues: Vignettes from Trains in Motion. In addition, she is a World Fantasy Award–winning illustrator, has previously been a translator and a lawyer, and holds both an MPhil and PhD in creative writing (Australian Gothic literature and creative observation, respectively).

Named a Top 10 New Fantasy by BookRiot!

“Eerie, mythic, and gorgeous, Jennings’ writing evokes the natural and the fantastical so deftly that it is hard to find where one ends and the other begins.” —Holly Black, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Book of Night

“Lush and atmospheric, this is an elegant cocktail of flood water and gum trees and secrets that refuse to stay safely drowned. Gorgeously written.” —T. Kingfisher, author of A Sorceress Comes to Call

“Eerie and mesmeric, silted with a deep sense of foreboding, Honeyeater reads like a memory-old myth, like something dangerous and true.” —Cassandra Khaw, author of Nothing But Blackened Teeth

“Honeyed, sense-filling prose. ...[An] enchanting novel of time and land.” —Paul Cornell, author of Witches of Lychford

“A drowning dizziness of the senses.” —C. S. E. Cooney, author of World Fantasy Award-winning Saint Death’s Daughter

“The strangest descent into the dark earth of a family's secrets you’ll ever read, glittering and exact and uncanny, rich with rot and perfume, full of bird-calls and waterlogged suburban heat.” —Francis Spufford, author of Cahokia Jazz

“Precarious, lush, elegant, and visceral at once, it is one of my favorite books this year.” —Molly Templeton for Reactor

“A book of real power and beauty shot through with an unsettling sense of the landscape it inhabits.” —The Saturday Paper

“Honeyeater is a marvelous demonstration of Kathleen Jennings’ gift for creating new legends that make imaginary places feel unnervingly real.” —Owen King, author of The Curator

“Honeyeater is a Gothic nightmare full of buried secrets and shambling horrors. Jennings’ prose has a powerful grip.” —Laird Barron, author of The Wind Began to Howl

“Bittersweet and gentle, Honeyeater is a delicate and dreamlike novella of ghosts, floods and the tales we tell in the darkness. A vision of suburbia rendered magical and extraordinary by Jennings’ deft touch.” —Angela Slatter, award-winning author of The Path of Thorns

“A highly atmospheric senses-saturating story.” —Elizabeth Knox, author of The Absolute Book

“A quiet tour de force of beauty, mystery, and slowly creeping horror.” —Delia Sherman, author of The Evil Wizard Smallbone

“An intricate and elegant tale that burrows under the reader's skin and breathes creepy new life into the modern ghost story.” —Tom Lloyd, author of The Stormcaller

Praise for Flyaway

“A fairytale wrapped about in riddles and other thorny bits of enchantments and stories, but none of them quite like any you’ve heard before. Kathleen Jennings' prose dazzles, and her magic feels real enough that you might even prick your finger on it.” —Kelly Link, author of the Pulitzer finalist, Get in Trouble

“Shirley Jackson Down Under: a brooding, bruising fairy tale about blood and history and sharp-toothed things waiting in the woods. I loved it.” —Alix E. Harrow, New York Times bestselling author of Starling House

“Half mystery, half fairy tale, all exquisitely rendered and full of teeth.” —Holly Black, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“Achingly gorgeous…. Jennings’ debut novella is both deeply indebted to the Australian gothic tradition and vibrantly, bewitchingly itself. A dark, delicious shrike's feast of a fairy tale.” —Brooke Bolander, Nebula and Locus award-winning author of The Only Harmless Great Thing

“I feel as if a very new voice has whispered a very old secret in my ear, and I’ll never be able to unhear it.” —C. S. E. Cooney