Verve Books – förlag

It's the early 1990s, and in the Irish village of Crossmore, Lucy feels out of place. Despite her fierce friendships, she's always felt this way, and the conventional path of marriage and motherhood doesn't appeal to her at all. Not even with handsome and doting Martin, her closest childhood friend.Lucy begins to make sense of herself during a long hot summer, when a spark with her school friend Susannah escalates to an all-consuming infatuation, and, very quickly, to a desperate and devastating love.Fearful of rejection from her small and conservative community, Lucy begins living a double life, hiding the most honest parts of herself in stolen moments with Susannah.But with the end of school and the opportunity to leave Crossmore looming, Lucy must choose between two places, two people and two futures, each as terrifying as the other. But only one can offer her real happiness.Sunburn is an astute and tender portrayal of first love, adolescent anxiety and the realities of growing up in a small town where tradition holds people tightly in its grasp.

After inexperienced seventeen-year-old Isaac loses his virginity through a dating app - a disappointing yet addictive experience - he spends his final months before university escaping into a dizzying new world of casual sex with forgettable men. This all changes when he meets twenty-eight-year-old Harrison at a party.Isaac is immediately infatuated by the handsome, charismatic artist, but while they grow closer, his sense of self becomes increasingly hazy. Harrison's demands shift constantly, and after Isaac tries everything to prove his worthiness, he must take a hard look at his ideas about love, sex and men, and his relationship with himself.

A candid portrayal of first love and self-discovery, from the author of the 'instant queer classic', Isaac.Cornwall, 2018. In the quiet fishing village of Portscatho, sixteen-year-old Daniel and seventeen-year-old Jago form an unexpected connection - something neither of them can name. What unfolds is transformative, particularly for Daniel, who for the first time feels truly seen.East London, 2023. Daniel has rewritten himself: sharper, louder, queer in a way the city understands. But a visit from Jago stirs up a reckoning with his former life, forcing them both to question how much change their bond can withstand.Reminiscent of Édouard Louis and Douglas Stuart's writing, Orange examines how we reconcile our past selves with the people we become, those we bring with us and those we leave behind.

A year into her dream job at a cutthroat Silicon Valley startup, Cassie is trapped in a corporate nightmare. Between the long hours, toxic bosses and unethical projects, she struggles to reconcile the glittering promise of a city where obscene wealth lives alongside abject poverty. Ivy League grads complain about the snack selection from a conference room with a view of houseless people bathing in the bay. Startup burnouts leap into the paths of commuter trains and men literally set themselves on fire in the streets.Though isolated, Cassie is never alone. From her earliest memory, the black hole has been her constant companion. It feeds on her depression and anxiety, its size changing in relation to her distress. The black hole watches, but it also waits. Its relentless pull draws Cassie ever closer as the world around her unravels.When her CEO's demands cross an illegal line and her personal life spirals towards a bleak precipice, Cassie must decide whether the tempting fruits of Silicon Valley are worth the pain, or succumb to the black hole.

January 1965. The orphaned O'Leary siblings - Tom, Jack, Anna and Peggy - arrive in the village of Ballycrea, tight-lipped about their troubled past and desperate for a fresh start.After being met with suspicion from most of the locals, the family are thrilled when they're taken under the wing of their well-respected neighbours, Bill and Betty Nevan, who offer them work, companionship and an opportunity to fit in.But for one of the O'Learys, this new friendship sparks an intense attachment that makes the dynamic dangerous for all. It's difficult to bury secrets, but almost impossible to bury feelings...Crackling with suspense and intensity from start to finish, Heap Earth Upon It revisits the rural Ireland of Howarth's critically acclaimed debut, delving into claustrophobic relationships and tangled identities, and leaving you wondering who to trust until the very last page.

In 2008, Desiree, January, Monique and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood and of big city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood - overwhelming, mysterious and full of freedom and consequences - swoops in and stays.Desiree is estranged from her sister Danielle, and the two nurse bitter family wounds in different ways. January\'s got a relationship with a 'good' man she feels ambivalent about, even after her surprise pregnancy. Monique, a librarian and aspiring blogger, finds unexpected online fame after calling out the university where she works for its plans to whitewash fraught history. And Nakia is trying to get her restaurant off the ground, without relying on the largesse of her upper middle-class family who wonder aloud if she should be doing something better with her life.As these friends transition from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another - amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability and the increasing volatility of modern life.The Wilderness is Angela Flournoy's masterful and kaleidoscopic follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut The Turner House. A generational talent, she captures with disarming wit and electric language how the most profound connections over a lifetime can lie in the tangled, uncertain thicket of friendship.

The Book of X tells the tale of Cassie, a girl born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. From childhood with her parents on the family meat farm, to a desk job in the city, to finally experiencing love, she grapples with her body, men, and society, all the while imagining a softer world than the one she is in.Twining the drama of the everyday - school-age crushes, paying bills, the sickness of parents - with the surreal - rivers of thighs, men for sale, and fields of throats - Cassie's realities alternate to create a blurred, fantastic world of haunting beauty.

Taut, panoramic and powerful; Paper Names is an unforgettable debut about the long shadows of our parents, the ripple effects of our decisions and the ways in which our love transcends difference.Outside a New York apartment building, an attempted mugging alters the lives of three people.Tony, a Chinese-born engineer turned Manhattan doorman, who immigrated to the United States to give his family a better life.His daughter, Tammy, who grapples with the expectations surrounding a first-generation American as she grows into an ambitious young woman.And Oliver, a charming white lawyer with a dark family secret, who is continuously propelled towards Tammy and Tony, whether by fate or his choices.Set in New York and China over three decades, Paper Names explores what it means to be American from three different perspectives. As Tony, Tammy and Oliver each strive for their own American dream, and make sacrifices to attain it, every joyous and heart-breaking twist in their stories begs the question: was it all worth it?

In Someone Like Me, editors Clem Bastow and Jo Case showcase the wide-ranging experiences of Autistic gender-diverse and women writers - and explode long-held stereotypes.When it comes to Autistic representation, BIPOC and white gender minorities have existed on the fringes of mainstream media for too long, rarely seeing representations of their unique experiences, hardships and triumphs.Delving into topics like sex, living room dance parties, the natural world, eating disorders, religion and all-encompassing passions, Someone Like Me brings together an eclectic mix of forms and voices that expand the cultural definition of the Autistic experience.Featuring contributions from authors from Australia and beyond - including Lucy Rose, author of The Lamb, and Naoise Dolan, author of Exciting Times - this groundbreaking anthology invites Autistic people of all kinds to find company in these pages, and maybe even see themselves too.

In late-twenty-first-century Australia, Tao-Yi and her partner Navin spend most of their time inside an immersive, consumerist virtual reality called Gaia. They log on, go to work, socialise and even eat in this digital utopia. Meanwhile, their aging bodies lie suspended in pods inside cramped apartments.Across the city, in the abandoned real world, Tao-Yi's mother remains stubbornly offline, dwindling away between hospital visits and memories of her earlier life in Malaysia.When a new technology is developed to permanently upload a human brain to Gaia, Tao-Yi must decide what is most important: a digital future or an authentic past.

London, June 1759. When a charmless civil servant takes his own life, few are interested in his death. But Lizzie Hardwicke, who plies her trade in the brothels of London whilst also working as an undercover sleuth for the magistrate, can see no reason why a man who had everything to look forward to would wish to end his life.Lizzie's search for answers takes her from the smoke-filled rooms of fashionable gambling houses, where politicians mix ambition with pleasure, to the violent streets of Soho, ready to erupt with riots in the sultry summer heat. All the while, she is navigating her complicated feelings for the magistrate's trusted assistant, Will Davenport, and a disturbing situation at home.Then a gambling house owner is brutally murdered, and Lizzie finds herself tangled in a chaos that she cannot control. The darkest of secrets threatens to turn Davenport against her forever; its exposure will send her to the gallows.

Death takes centre stage. Does the killer lie in the wings?An undercover assignment for the Bow Street magistrate sees Lizzie Hardwicke trade Mrs Farley's Bawdy House in Soho for life as a seamstress at a theatre on Drury Lane. Once there, she quickly realises that what goes on in the wings is much more intriguing than the theatrics being played out onstage...When a high-profile investor is brutally hanged at centre stage, Lizzie discovers the body and is once again thrown together with William Davenport, the magistrate\'s assistant with whom she is growing ever closer. The suspect list rivals any casting call, and Lizzie must use every trick hidden up her sleeve to see through all the performance and bring the culprit into the spotlight.

Blood may be thicker than water, but is family more important than the truth?London, August 1759. Lizzie Hardwicke, society harlot and occasional investigator for the magistrate, is shaken by an encounter with her estranged brother during a riotous evening hosted by the notorious Devils' Brotherhood. Beyond the opulence of this Mayfair party, a streetwalker is found strangled on the doorstep of a well-known moral campaigner, her cheek branded with the letter V.When more girls are discovered dead and similarly marked, Lizzie fears that someone stalks the streets with a violent hatred of women, and as the evidence begins to point to her own brother, any remaining family loyalty she has is severely tested.Her past catches up with her and her future becomes increasingly dangerous, yet Lizzie is still unaware of darker plots being hatched in the shadows by those who wish to silence her for good. This time, the consequences of her investigations will lead her to a place where even Will Davenport, the one man she trusts, won't be able to find her.

No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister.It is said that when one person in a family is unstable, the whole family is destabilized. Meet the Shreds. Ollie is the sister in the spotlight until her stunning confidence becomes erratic and unpredictable, a hurricane leaving people wrecked in her wake. Younger sister Amy, cautious and studious to the core, believes in facts, proof and the empirical world. None of that explains what's happening to Ollie, whose physical beauty and charisma mask the mental illness that will shatter Amy's carefully constructed life.As Amy comes of age and seeks to find her place - first in academia, then New York publishing, and through a series of troubled relationships - every step brings collisions with Ollie, who slips in and out of the Shred family without warning. Yet for all that threatens their sibling bond, Amy and Ollie cannot escape or deny the inextricable sister knot that binds them.Spanning two decades, Shred Sisters is an intimate and bittersweet story exploring the fierce complexities of sisterhood, mental health, loss and love.

Everyone loves a story about people who beat the odds. But what about those who didn't?In the years she spent hoping to conceive a child with her husband, Chloé Caldwell consumed everything she could find on infertility. No matter the book or reddit forum, her experiences seemed absent amid stories of IVF and miracle babies.Bouncing between her job at a boutique selling 'life-changing pants' and the fertility clinic offering 'innovative ways to create your family', Caldwell ignored the sense that something else in her life was wrong - until she extracted a confession from her husband.In this candid and intimate memoir, Caldwell confronts the irresolution and uncertainty of those denied their deepest desire to become a mother and discovers how, even in the depths of grief, new pleasures and possibilities can be found.What begins as an account of trying to create life becomes a bold and brave journey to rebuild one's own.At once hilarious and heartbreaking, Trying reveals how, even when life blows up, sometimes it's only the beginning.

January 1965. The orphaned O'Leary siblings - Tom, Jack, Anna and Peggy - arrive in the village of Ballycrea, tight-lipped about their troubled past and desperate for a fresh start.After being met with suspicion from most of the locals, the family are thrilled when they're taken under the wing of their well-respected neighbours, Bill and Betty Nevan, who offer them work, companionship and an opportunity to fit in.But for one of the O'Learys, this new friendship sparks an intense attachment that makes the dynamic dangerous for all. It's difficult to bury secrets, but almost impossible to bury feelings...

January 1965. The orphaned O'Leary siblings - Tom, Jack, Anna and Peggy - arrive in the village of Ballycrea, tight-lipped about their troubled past and desperate for a fresh start.After being met with suspicion from most of the locals, the family are thrilled when they're taken under the wing of their well-respected neighbours, Bill and Betty Nevan, who offer them work, companionship and an opportunity to fit in.But for one of the O'Learys, this new friendship sparks an intense attachment that makes the dynamic dangerous for all. It's difficult to bury secrets, but almost impossible to bury feelings...Like Howarth's acclaimed debut, Heap Earth Upon It explores rural Irish life at a specific moment in time and delves into claustrophobic relationships and tangled identities, leaving you wondering who to trust until the very last page.

A spellbinding tale of sisterhood, betrayal and reclamation revolving around three 18th-century wax models of women, known as Anatomical Venuses or 'slashed beauties'. Legend has it, these beauties are bewitched, coming to life to murder men who have wronged them.Finally, these men will get what they deserve. We will make sure of it. Together.Seoul, present day: Antiques dealer Alys is offered a vast sum of money to transport one of three highly coveted Anatomical Venuses to London, with one key condition - she must destroy it when she reaches the city.London, 1769: After a chance meeting at the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, young and inexperienced Eleanor is promised a life of luxury by the beautiful and charismatic Elizabeth and her protégé, Emily. All she must do is allow Elizabeth complete control of her destiny.In a darkly compelling and magical plot, prepare to discover the dangerous secret shared by these four women - a secret that spans centuries, and which will unearth horrors not of this world.

In 1935, six-year-old Emily Evans vanishes from her family's summer house on a remote Minnesota lake. Her disappearance destroys the family - her father takes his own life, and her mother and two older sisters spend the rest of their lives at the lake house, keeping a decades-long vigil for the lost child.Sixty years later, Lucy, the quiet and watchful middle sister, lives in the lake house alone. Before her death, she writes the story of that devastating summer in a notebook that she leaves, along with the house, to the only person who might care: her grandniece, Justine. For Justine, the lake house offers freedom and stability - a way to escape her manipulative boyfriend and give her daughters the home she never had. But the long Minnesota winter is just beginning. The house is cold and dilapidated. The dark, silent lake is isolated and eerie. Her only neighbor is a strange old man who seems to know more about the summer of 1935 than he's telling.Soon Justine's troubled oldest daughter becomes obsessed with Emily's disappearance, her absent mother reappears, and the man she left launches a dangerous plan to get her back. In a house haunted by the sorrows of the women who came before her, Justine must overcome their tragic legacy if she hopes to save herself and her children.

Grace is no longer famous. She sits alone in her New York apartment, endlessly watching reruns of herself on the reality TV show Speed Daters. Then, one evening, a man breaks in through her window. A rare, still-obsessed fan or raging incel - Grace is unsure. Before she can find out, he disappears. That same night, the world is rocked by the news that Anoushka, Grace's onscreen rival, has taken her own life. Suddenly thrust back into the public eye, Grace is thrilled to be relevant again. Driven by a familiar desperation for love and attention, she clings to the dregs of her old life: her followers; her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Cal; and her unstable influencer income. But fame is fickle, and Grace's image is fragile. When the fans begin to turn on her, Grace escapes with Cal to his isolated cabin. In the woods with nothing but each other, can they mend what's broken without destroying what little is left? A piercing debut exposing the toxicities of reality TV and influencer culture, After Care is a disconcertingly recognisable portrait of reckless consumerism, spectatorship and the attention economy.

Struggling to deal with the familial trauma of her Catholic upbringing, hotel cleaner, Noelle, travels to the Isle of Bute. There, she meets a man who claims to be a vampire, and a relationship blooms between them based solely on confession.But as talk turns sacrilegious, and the weather outside grows colder, Noelle struggles to come to terms with her blasphemous sexuality. She becomes hounded by memories of her past: her mother's affair with the local priest, and the part she played in ending it.Bridging the gaps between contemporary gothic fiction, queer fiction and magical realism, Fragile Animals lures readers into Noelle's loose grasp on her world and immerses them in some of Scotland's most harsh and claustrophobic environments.

A timely and poignant story of masculinity, addiction and grief told from the perspectives of two Jewish-American brothers coming of age.Phillip grows up in the glow of his mother's adoration, moulded by her praise and attention into a young man who values intellect above all else. However, his introspective mind soon becomes a prison, one that distances him from the rest of the world - socially, romantically, politically - and can only be escaped using drugs and alcohol.An outsider to the closeness shared by Phillip and their mother, elder brother Donald is shaped by the long-distance phone calls he receives from their absentee father. This father-son bond feels entirely predicated on Donald's success on the wrestling mat, where he spends his teenage years grappling with competitors and his sense of self.After an unexpected family tragedy strikes, the brothers are pulled apart and reunited over the course of their lives, forcing them to reckon with the legacy that they've inherited. A novel that is as much family saga as cultural excavation of modern masculinity, When On High asks what it means to become men in a country losing grip with what a man should be.

When sixteen-year-old Gabriel Lazris, an American in Santiago, meets Caro Ravest at a party in 1973, something clicks. They fall fast, but with everyone saying there's going to be a coup - and no one saying it louder than Gabriel's Nixon-loving father - Gabriel is afraid his parents will force him to return home. But to Gabriel, Chile is home.Decades later, Gabriel's American-raised adult daughter Nina heads to Buenos Aires in a last-ditch effort to save her dissertation. She quickly gets sidetracked: first by a sexy professor, then by a controversial book called Guerra Eterna. A document of war and an underground classic, Guerra Eterna destabilises Nina's identity and drags Gabriel's past into the light.

At a meatpacking facility in Missouri, Dee-Dee and her coworkers kill and butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift.The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee's more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, Dee-Dee has found herself pregnant, and she is determined to carry this child to term.Dee-Dee fled the Pentecostal church years ago, but judgment follows her in the form of regular calls from her mother, whose raspy voice urges her to quit living in sin and marry her boyfriend, Daddy, an underemployed ex-con with an insect fetish. With a child on the way, at long last Dee-Dee can bask in her mother and boyfriend's newfound attention. She will matter. She will be loved. She will be complete.When her charismatic friend Sloane reappears after a twenty-year absence, feeding her insecurities and awakening suppressed desires, Dee-Dee fears she will go back to living in the shadows. Neither another miscarriage nor Sloane's own pregnancy deters her: she must prepare for the baby's arrival.

The last time Maeve saw her cousin was the night she escaped the cult they were raised in.For the past two decades, Maeve has worked hard to build a normal life in New York City, where she keeps everything - and everyone - at a safe distance.When her cousin Andrea suddenly reappears, Maeve regains the only true friend she's ever had. Soon she's spending more time at Andrea's remote Catskills estate than in her own cramped apartment. Maeve doesn't even mind that her cousin's wealthy work friends clearly disapprove of her single lifestyle. After all, Andrea has made her fortune in the fertility industry - baby fever comes with the territory.What worries Maeve is that the more she immerses herself in Andrea's world, the more her long-buried memories flood to the surface. But confronting the terrors of her childhood may be the only way for Maeve to transcend the nightmare still to come...

A love story about the almost crossovers of our lives...1972. On a quiet summer night in Newcastle, Australia, two teenage girls must each make a choice: to act upon their desires or suppress them? To live an openly queer life or to try desperately not to?Over the following three decades, these girls grow into women and live out their decisions, always almost crossing paths at pivotal moments. In an era that spans Australia's first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, there is joy and grief and loss and desire for each of them - but will their lives ever collide?A Language of Limbs is about love and how it's policed, friendship and how it transcends, and hilarity in the face of heartbreak. A celebration of queer life in all its vibrancy and colour, this story finds the humanity in all of us and demands we claim our futures for ourselves.

The inaugural collection in the new VERVE Voices series, Queerphoria is a joyful and defiant queer-authored anthology proudly supporting Switchboard, the national LGBTQIA+ support line.Four housemates welcome the reader into their home for a birthday party. An elderly widow visits her first queer bar, beneath the flat she shared with her husband. A couple invite a shipwrecked sailor into their isolated lighthouse on the stormy night of their thirtieth anniversary. A single woman embarks on a romantic relationship with a sex robot. A married couple secretly prepare for their baby's arrival in a world where procreation is controlled by the Establishment.Through prose, poetry, essays, illustrations and more, thirty-one writers bring their visions of euphoria to life. These pages celebrate, subvert, expand and reimagine what joy can look like, even in uncertain times.

'Disturbing and compulsive' - CosmopolitanBeginning with a story of an ex-sex worker drifting through a small rural town in the south and ending with the wedding night of a young woman who learns from her new husband what it takes to kill a man, Nash writes across the complications of working-class women, rendering their desires with visceral prose and psychologically dissecting the fundamental root that threads her work: craving and the conflicts within.

'A desire map, a cartography of eros... A heartbomb' - Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of JoanIn 2005, a young woman with no name embarks on a fraught three-way relationship with Matt, a tattoo artist, and his girlfriend Frances, a new mum. She begins to recognise the dark undertow of obsession and jealousy that her presence has created between Matt and Frances, and finds herself balancing on a knife's edge between pain and pleasure, the promise of the future and the crushing isolation of the present.With stripped-down prose and unflinching clarity, Nash examines madness in the wreckage of love, and the loss of self that accompanies it.