Nightshade

Lynn Hutchinson Lee is an award-winning author 'of Anglo-Romany descent on her father's side. Her short fiction was published in Room, Wagtail: The Roma Women’s Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere. An excerpt from Nightshade won first prize in the 2022 Joy Kogawa Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2022 Swedish Writers’ Festival Prize. In 2023, Nightshade was shortlisted for the Guernica Prize. Her flash fiction won the Editors’ Choice Award in Guernica's This Will Only Take a Minute. Her novella Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens is published with Stelliform Press. Lynn writes in Toronto, cooks for friends, feeds birds, and gets lost in her garden.

"Amid an entrancing undertow of natural beauty and seductive materialism, the novel Nightshade is a story about identity, longing, and a unique cultural heritage."—Foreword Reviews"With its layering of magic realism and its lusciously gothic sense of dread, Nightshade is somehow both uplifting and haunting—an enticing coming-of-age novel, and a nuanced and tender exploration of the Romany diaspora."—Winnipeg Free Press"Nightshade is as dreamy as it is unnerving. Hutchinson Lee’s lush, imaginative prose fills the labourers’ days with sensory detail: summer heat that feels like swimming through flames, autumn winds scented with aster and goldenrod."—Literary Review of Canada"Nightshade is an evocative and surreal read, conjuring sun-soaked tobacco fields, laced through with dread and magic. Hutchinson Lee has crafted a compelling story of strong women, the snares of wealth, and what happens when the puppeteers themselves find they are no longer the ones pulling the strings."—Anuja Varghese, author of Chrysalis"What a marvel. In Nightshade, Lynn Hutchinson Lee conjures a world of heat-hazed fields and white gardens where glamour beckons and danger moves just out of sight. Zelda’s desire to be seen—by wealth, by power—meets the fierce love and warning of Romany women who know the cost. The prose is sensuous and exact, the folklore alive, the politics unflinching. This is a novel about work and hunger, inheritance and passing, and the thin veil between rescue and trap. I’ll be pressing it into many hands."—Oksana Marafioti, author of American Gypsy: A Memoir"Hutchinson Lee has created a gorgeous, swirling story about family and heritage and temptation in this novel. Centering on a Romani family working on a tobacco farm in the early 1980s, we become particularly close to Zelda, who is desperate for the ease and opportunity that she thinks will come when she leaves her family and seeks a life elsewhere. Puri Dai dances in and out of the story, having vivid dreams and sharing knowledge and warnings that will hopefully keep Zelda and the family safe. An interesting read about Romani heritage, thankfully written by a gifted author of Romani descent."—Manda Barker, Raven Book Store"Lynn Hutchinson Lee’s moving story about a Roma family working in the tobacco fields of southwestern Ontario during the 80s is a tour de force. Matriarch Rhodie and her sisters and daughter fight to preserve their culture while struggling with poverty, sub-par housing, cheating supervisors, accidents and more. The family’s struggles are interwoven with descriptions of nature—plants, birds and stars, crafted in a haunting poetic prose. Simultaneously prose poem and page-turner, Nightshadedraws us into the lives of its characters. Readers will come to love fragile Liza-May, who tends to ill and injured birds, feisty Lilly, who stands up to injustice, and protagonist Zelda. Eighteen, Zelda longs forher own life and, like so many young women before her, makes both missteps and giant steps discovering what her own path might be. And thepuppets! Grandmother puppet Puri Dai’s voice infuses the novel with a gentle wisdom, as she attempts to protect both her wooden and human charges."—Ursula Pflug, author of Mountain"Lynn Hutchinson Lee’s novel Nightshade gives a very rare and precious insight into a Romany family and community, their language and history; and I for one am so grateful it has been written. Reading the novel, the author’s words come from a wise and very old nomadic tradition. For many of us in the disconnected twenty-first century, it is time to speak about our hidden Romany identity and heritage. Today, it is about being a participant in a global story. Reading Nightshade, I felt like I was coming home."—Frances Roberts Reilly, author of Parramisha: A Romani Poetry Collection