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The Naming of the Birds
PARAIC O'DONNELL
"Dark, exuberant, and something very special."
—Jon McGregor
The next installment of the “thrilling gothic mystery” series (TIME ), following the acclaimed bestseller The House on Vesper Sands, arrives in full force as Inspector Cutter and Sergeant Bliss solve their strangest and most personal case yet.
Something is troubling Inspector Henry Cutter. Sergeant Gideon Bliss is accustomed to his ill-tempered outbursts, but lately the inspector has grown silent and withdrawn.
Then, the murders begin. The first to die is the elderly Sir Aneurin Considine, a decorated but obscure civil servant who long ago retired to tend his orchids. If the motive for his killing is a mystery, the manner of his death is more bewildering still. The victims that follow suffer similar fates, their deaths gruesome but immaculately orchestrated. The murderer comes and goes like a ghost, leaving only carefully considered traces. As the hunt for this implacable adversary mounts, the inspector’s gloom deepens, and to Sergeant Bliss, his methods seem as mystifying as the crimes themselves.
Why is he digging through dusty archives while the murderer stalks further victims? And as hints of past wrongdoing emerge—and with them the faint promise of a motive—why does Inspector Cutter seem haunted by some long-ago failing of his own?
To find the answers, the meek and hapless sergeant must step out of the inspector’s shadow. Aided by Octavia Hillingdon, a steely and resourceful journalist, Sergeant Bliss will uncover truths that test his deepest beliefs.
Hypnotic and twisty, Paraic O’Donnell’s The Naming of the Birds will ensnare you until the final pages and leave you questioning what matters most—solving a case or serving justice.
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PARAIC O'DONNELL
is the author of The House on Vesper Sands and The Maker of Swans. He lives in Wicklow, Ireland, with his wife and two children, and can usually be found in the garden.
to put down, The House on Vesper Sands offers a glimpse into the strange undertow of late nineteenth-century London and the secrets we all hold inside us.
“A thrilling gothic mystery.” TIME
“Ensconced in the rich, Gothic embellishments of Mr. O’Donnell’s prose . . . . The House on Vesper Sands performs a . . . kind of enchantment, transforming a chronicle of sordid crimes into an enjoyably eerie ghost story.” The Wall Street Journal
“Practically comes with the mood lighting one would hope for when reading a Victorian-era mystery.”—Oprah Daily
“O'Donnell keeps his reader gripped with his fast pace, ingenious plotting, and narrative twists and turns. . . . A fiendishly entertaining winter's tale.” Star Tribune
“Vivid atmospherics and frequently comedic dialogue animate this highly polished novel.”—The Washington Post
The House on Vesper Sands
US $16.95 (CAN $22.95) • Paperback
ISBN 978-1-951142-98-8 • 5 ½" x 8 ½" • 416 pages
Roger Kenny
Set between Nigeria and New Orleans,
The Edge of Water
OLUFUNKE GRACE BANKOLE
ISBN 978-1-963108-05-7 • 5 ½" x 8 ½" • 272 pages
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The Edge of Water tells the story of a young woman who dreams of life in America as the collision of traditional prophecy and individual longing tests the bonds of a family during a devastating storm.
In Ibadan, Nigeria, a mother receives a divination that foretells danger for her daughter in America. In spite of this warning, she allows her to forge her own path, and Amina arrives in New Orleans filled with hope. But just as Amina begins to find her way, a hurricane threatens to destroy the city, upending everything she’d dreamed of and the lives of all she holds dear. Years later, her daughter is left with questions about the mother she barely knew and the family she has yet to discover in Nigeria. Exploring the love of a determined mother and dreaming daughter who do not say enough to each other until it is too late; the detangling of Yoruba Christianity, traditional religion, and folklore; and the tellings of three generations of daring women— through times of longing, promise, and romance, as well as heartbreak—Olufunke Grace Bankole’s The Edge of Water is a luminous debut novel about a young woman brave enough to leave all she knows behind, and the way her fate transforms a family destined to stay together.
OLUFUNKE GRACE BANKOLE
is a Nigerian American writer. A graduate of Harvard Law School and a recipient of a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship, her work has appeared in various literary journals, including Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, the Antioch Review, and Stand. She won the first-place prize in the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers, and was the Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has been awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship in Fiction, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, a residency-fellowship from the Anderson Center at Tower View, and has received a Pushcart Special Mention for her writing. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Malak Yassin
“Unfailingly interesting and even revelatory. . . .
Reading about the unfettered freedom to roam enjoyed by these trailblazing women induced considerable vicarious pleasure—and envy.”
The Wall Street Journal
Annabel Abbs-Streets’s
Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women tifully written meditation on connecting with the outdoors through the simple act of walking. In cap tivating and elegant prose, Annabel follows in the footsteps of women who boldly reclaimed wild land scapes for themselves, including Georgia O’Keeffe in the empty plains of Texas and New Mexico, Nan Shepherd in the mountains of Scotland, Gwen John following the French River Garonne, Daphne du Maurier along the River Rhône, and Simone de Beauvoir—who walked as much as twenty-five miles a day in a dress and espadrilles―through the moun tains and forests of France.
Part historical inquiry and part memoir, the sto ries of these writers and artists are laced together by moments in Annabel’s own life, beginning with her poet father who raised her in the Welsh country side as an “experiment,” according to the principles of Rousseau. Annabel explores a forgotten legacy of moving on foot and discovers how it has helped women throughout history find their voices, reimag ine their lives, and break free from convention.
Windswept
Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women
ANNABEL ABBS-STREETS
As Annabel traces the paths of exceptional women, she realizes that she, too, is walking away from her past and into a radically different future. Windswept crosses continents and centuries in a provocative and poignant account of the power of walking in nature.
ANNABEL ABBS-STREETS
is an award-winning author and journalist. She writes regularly for a wide range of newspapers and magazines and lives in London, with her husband and four children.
ON SALE FEBRUARY 18, 2025
US $17.95 (CAN $23.95) • Paperback
ISBN 978-1-963108-13-2 • 5 ½" x 8 ½" • 392 pages
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Aaron Hargreaves
No Less Strange or Wonderful Essays in Curiosity
A. KENDRA GREENE
US $28.95 (CAN $38.95) • Paper Over Board
ISBN 978-1-963108-08-8 • 5 ½" x 8 ½"
272 pages • 35 black-and-white images
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“Greene is the best kind of guide: funny, probing, generous of mind and heart.” —Ben Fountain
Exploding sharks, trees riding bicycles, a Hollywood-esque balloon dress, a giant sloth in costume, a stolen woodpecker, and a sentient bag of wasps—and remember: this is nonfiction.
Celebrated author and artist A. Kendra Greene’s No Less Strange or Wonderful is a brilliant and generous meditation—on the complex wonder of being alive, and on how to pay attention to even the tiniest (sometimes strangest) details that glitter with insight, whimsy, and deep humanity, if only we’d
In twenty-six sparkling essays, illuminated through both text and image, Greene is trying to make sense— of anything, really—but especially the things that matter most in life: love, connection, death, grief, the universe, meaning, nothingness, and everythingness. Through a series of encounters with strangers, children, and animals, the wild merges with the domestic; the everyday meets the sublime. Each essay returns readers to our smallest moments and our largest ones in a book that makes us realize—through its exuberant language, playful curation, and delightful associative leapfrogging—that they are, in fact, one in the same.
A. KENDRA GREENE is a writer and book artist. She is the author and illustrator of The Museum of Whales You Will Never See. Her work has come into being with fellowships from Fulbright, MacDowell, Yaddo, Dobie Paisano, and the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard. She lives in Dallas, Texas.
“Intensely beautiful poems that arrange perception and then rearrange it, in the way that identity and memory do. —Victoria Chang
To whom do we belong, and at what cost? Patrycja Humienik’s debut poetry collection, We Contain Landscapes, is haunted by questions of desire, borders, and the illusion of national belong ing. Bringing music and rich sensory detail to the page, these poems attend to the inextricable link between our bodies and the land. Over six rumina tive and lush sections, they survey place and memory, both intergenerationally and through emotional bonds with other immigrant daughters. Weaving in letters, innovative forms, and medi tations on devotion, sexuality, and self-deceit, Contain Landscapes introduces a speaker who “will not turn away from the ache of this world.” For every reader who also harbors a voracious longing to encounter infinite landscapes and ways of being, this incisive collection dreams toward a more expan sive idea of kinship—of becoming beloved to one another and ourselves.
We Contain Landscapes
ISBN 978-1-963108-04-0 • 6" x 9" • 120 pages
PATRYCJA HUMIENIK , daughter of Polish immigrants, is a writer, editor, and performance artist. She has developed writing and movement workshops for the Henry Art Gallery, Arts+Literature Laboratory, Northwest Film Forum, in prisons, and elsewhere. An MFA candidate at UWMadison, she serves as events director for The Seventh Wave, where she is also an editor for the Community Anthologies project. Patrycja grew up in Evanston, Illinois, and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
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Sour Cherry
ISBN 978-1-963108-19-4 • 5 ½" x 8 ½" • 288 pages
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“A diamondwork— a treasure chest filled with objects from another world.” —Morgan Talty
The tale begins with Agnes. After losing her baby, Agnes is called to the great manor house to nurse the local lord’s baby boy. But something is wrong with the child: his nails grow too fast, his skin smells of soil, and his eyes remind her of the dark forest. As he grows into a boy, then into man, a plague seems to follow him everywhere. Trees wither at the roots, fruits rot on their branches, and the town turns to desperation. The man takes a wife, who bears him a son. But tragedy strikes in cycles and his family is forced to consider their own malignancy—until wife after wife, death after death, plague after plague, every woman he touches becomes a ghost. The ghosts become a chorus, and they call urgently to our narrator as she tries to explain, in our very real world, exactly what has happened to her. The ghosts can all agree on one thing, an inescapable truth about this man, this powerful lord who has loved them and led them each to ruin: if you leave, you die. But if you die, you stay.
Natalia Theodoridou’s haunting and unforgettable debut novel, Sour Cherry, confronts age-old systems of gender and power, long-held excuses made for bad men, and the complicated reasons we stay captive to the monsters we love.
NATALIA THEODORIDOU is a queer and transmasculine writer whose stories have appeared in venues such as Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, and Strange Horizons, and have been translated into Italian, French, Greek, Estonian, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic. He won the World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction and the Emerging Writer Award by Moniack Mhor & The Bridge Awards, and has been a finalist for the Nebula Awards multiple times. Born in Greece, with roots in Georgia, Russia, and Turkey, he currently lives in the UK.
From celebrated author Julia Elliott, Hellions is a genre-bending collection of stories that ranges like a feral dog from medieval Europe to the heart of the contemporary South and on into strange, tech-mediated futures.
From the acclaimed author of Wilds comes an electric story collection that blends folklore, fairy tales, Southern Gothic, and horror, reveling in the collision of the familiar with the wildly surreal.
In a plague-stricken medieval convent, a nun works on a forbidden mystic manuscript, pining for Christ’s love. During a long, muggy July in rural South Carolina, an adolescent girl finds unexpected power as her family obsesses over the horror film The Exorcist. On the outskirts of a Southern col lege town, a young woman resists the tyranny of a shape-shifting older professor as she develops her own sorceress skills. And at a feminist art colony in the North Carolina mountains, a group of moth ers contends with the supernatural talents their children have picked up from a pair of mysterious orphans who live in the woods. With exuberance, ferocity, and astounding imagination, Julia Elliott’s Hellions jumps from the occult to the comic, from the horrific to the wondrous, presenting earth bound characters who long for the otherworldly.
JULIA ELLIOTT is the author the story collection The Wilds, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and the novel The New and Improved Romie Futch (both from Tin House). Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, and the New York Times. She has won a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and her stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. She teaches English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina, and lives in Columbia with her husband, daughter, and five hens.
Also Available from Tin House: The New and Improved Romie Futch
978-1-941040-15-7
978-1-935639-92-3
Hellions
JULIA ELLIOTT
US $17.95 (CAN $23.95) • Trade Paperback Original ISBN
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NOW IN PAPERBACK
Village Weavers
MYRIAM
J. A. CHANCY
“For fans of
Elena Ferrante: Myriam J. A. Chancy’s Village Weavers is a wistful look at a complicated female friendship that spans decades and continents.”
TIME
US $17.95 (CAN $23.95) • Paperback
ISBN 978-1-963108-07-1 • 5 ½" x 8 ½" • 352 pages
NATIONAL MARKETING CAMPAIGN
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In 1940s’ Port-au-Prince, Gertie and Sisi become fast childhood friends, despite being on opposite ends of the social and economic ladder. As young girls, they build their unlikely friendship—until a deathbed revelation ripples through their families and tears them apart. After François Duvalier’s rule turns deadly in the 1950s, Sisi moves to Paris, while Gertie marries into a wealthy Dominican family. Across decades and continents, through personal successes and failures, they are parted and reunited, slowly learning the truth of their singular relationship. Finally, six decades later, with both women in the United States, a sudden phone call brings them together once more to reckon with and forgive the past.
Told with power and frankness, Village Weavers confronts the silences around class, race, and nationality; charts the moments when lives are irrevocably forced apart; and envisions two girls—connected their entire lives—who break inherited cycles of mistrust to find ways back into each other’s hearts.
MYRIAM J. A. CHANCY
is the author of What Storm, What Thunder, awarded an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and named a best book of the year by NPR, Kirkus, Chicago Public Library, New York Public Library, the Boston Globe, and the Globe and Mail. Her past novels include
The Loneliness of Angels, winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature Caribbean Award; The Scorpion’s Claw ; and Spirit of Haiti, short-listed for the Commonwealth Prize. She is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and HBA Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College in California.
Also Available from Tin House: What Storm, What Thunder Paperback • 978-1-953534-38-5
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