As award season rapidly approaches, we’re very happy to report that Aliette de Bodard, Lavie Tidhar, and Anne Griffin have picked up a couple more nominations!
First up, Aliette’s THE TEA MASTER AND THE DETECTIVE has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella! This critically-acclaimed novella is published by Subterranean Press (US) and via the JABberwocky eBook Program. Here’s the synopsis…
Welcome to the Scattered Pearls Belt, a collection of ring habitats and orbitals ruled by exiled human scholars and powerful families, and held together by living mindships who carry people and freight between the stars. In this fluid society, human and mindship avatars mingle in corridors and in function rooms, and physical and virtual realities overlap, the appearance of environments easily modified and adapted to interlocutors or current mood.
A transport ship discharged from military service after a traumatic injury, The Shadow’s Child now ekes out a precarious living as a brewer of mind-altering drugs for the comfort of space-travellers. Meanwhile, abrasive and eccentric scholar Long Chau wants to find a corpse for a scientific study. When Long Chau walks into her office, The Shadow’s Child expects an unpleasant but easy assignment. When the corpse turns out to have been murdered, Long Chau feels compelled to investigate, dragging The Shadow’s Child with her.
As they dig deep into the victim’s past, The Shadow’s Child realizes that the investigation points to Long Chau’s own murky past — and, ultimately, to the dark and unbearable void that lies between the stars…
The novella is set in de Bodard’s Hugo Award-nominated Xuya Universe. The novella also won a Nebula Award, and was nominated for both a Locus Award and a Hugo Award.
The World FAntasy Awards will be presents at the World Fantasy Convention in Los Angeles, between October 31st-November 3rd, 2019.
Secondly, Lavie’s short story BAG MAN has been nominated for the CWA Short Story Dagger! The Crime Writers’ Association awards (“daggers”) are given to the best crime writing in the various categories. BAG MAN appears in THE OUTCAST HOURS — an anthology edited by Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin, published by Solaris…
These are the stories of people who live at night: under neon and starlight, and never the light of the sun.
These are the stories of poets and police, tourists and traders; the hidden and the forbidden; the lonely and the lovers.
This is their time.
The CWA Dagger winners will be announced at the Dagger Award ceremony at the Grange City Hotel, London, on 24th October, 2019.
Anne Griffin‘s sensational debut novel, WHEN ALL IS SAID, has been nominated for this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival First Book Award, and has also appeared on the Not the Booker Longlist! Published by Sceptre in the UK and St. Martin’s Press in North America, Here’s the synopsis…
Five toasts. Five people. One lifetime.
‘I’m here to remember – all that I have been and all that I will never be again.’
At the bar of a grand hotel in a small Irish town sits 84-year-old Maurice Hannigan. He’s alone, as usual -though tonight is anything but. Pull up a stool and charge your glass, because Maurice is finally ready to tell his story.
Over the course of this evening, he will raise five toasts to the five people who have meant the most to him. Through these stories – of unspoken joy and regret, a secret tragedy kept hidden, a fierce love that never found its voice – the life of one man will be powerfully and poignantly laid bare.
Heart-breaking and heart-warming all at once, the voice of Maurice Hannigan will stay with you long after all is said.
You can read an interview with Anne over on the Caledonian Novel Award page.