Melissa Ginsburg – författare

Longlisted for The John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger 2017Twenty-two-year-old Charlotte Ford reconnects with Danielle, her best friend from high school, a few days before Danielle is found bludgeoned to death in a motel room. In the wake of the murder, Charlotte's life unravels and she descends into the city's underbelly, where she meets the strippers, pornographers and drug dealers who surrounded Danielle in the years they were estranged.Ginsburg's Houston is part of a lesser known south, where the urban and rural collide gracelessly. In this shadowy world, culpability and sympathy blur in a debut novel which thrillingly brings its three female protagonists to the fore. Scary, funny and almost unbearably sad, Sunset City is written with rare grace and empathy holding you transfixed, praying for some kind of escape for Charlotte.

'Superb.' The Guardian'A page-turner.' Jonathan Lethem'Utterly unique, addictively readable.' Pandora Sykes'Intriguing, elegant and seductive.' Jessica Moor'You can't put it down.' Kevin WilsonAfter the sudden death of her mother, Ava finds herself headed cross-country to live with the only relative she has left. But Lane, her grandmother, doesn't seem to have much room in her heart for a teenage girl, barely acknowledging Ava between obsessive painting sessions. The only other person who comes around is Lane's assistant, Oliver, who's dealing with issues of his own.As the summer goes on, Ava begins to get a sense that something is very wrong in her grandmother's house. Why was Lane estranged from Ava's mother, and is she now losing her mind? Could the danger lie with Oliver? Or, is there something darker in their past, something which could come back to destroy them all?

With lush imagery and surprising syntactical turns, the poems in Doll Apollo merge mythology with close attention to the patterns, colors, and contours of the material world. Through the figure of the paper doll, the hoax conspiracy surrounding the Apollo moon landing, and lyrics embedded with violence and beauty, Melissa Ginsburg's feminist ecopoetics weaves the domestic and celestial into considerations of female identity, desire, spiritual yearning, and doubt. Throughout, Doll Apollo remains rooted in scenery and music, as Ginsburg embraces her subjects with humor and verbal and formal play.