Honeyeater

“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

“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

“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.” —Thomas Lloyd, author of The Stormcaller

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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.