This summer, Ballantine Books will publish Mudlark by Mary Helen Specht (author of Migratory Animals). I’ll admit that it was the cover that first caught my attention (well done, artist/designer — unfortunately, not sure who it is), but the synopsis further piqued my interest. The book is a “dystopian novel about the fall of a troubled rockstar, her long-lost solo album, and her daughter’s epic search for redemption in the ruins of New York City”. Here’s the full synopsis:
Jenny Sweet’s marriage is ending — and with it her band and maybe even her fragile relationship with her thirteen-year-old daughter, Neko. A reluctant wife and mother, Jenny plans a new journey of self-discovery after one more gig at Burning Man. But when Neko disappears amid the chaos of the festival, Jenny fears that everything that mattered to her has been lost. As she races against the dark, Jenny finds herself thrown into the past, and into the heart of a gathering storm.
Now twenty-five, Neko is a mudlark: a trained recruit who braves the rival factions and feral survivalists in the ruins of a crumbling, flooded Manhattan for resources that grow scarcer by the day. When she stumbles upon the master of her mother’s long-lost solo album and later hears that someone else is searching for it — someone who could be her mother, missing for over a decade—she embarks on a perilous adventure with a ragtag crew that will take her from treetop societies to decadent raves to the underground bunker where she will, finally, confront her mother’s fate — and her own.
I’m very much looking forward to reading this. I think it’ll probably appeal to fans of Emily St. John Mandel and other authors of “literary SFF”.
Mary Helen Specht’s Mudlark is due to be published by Ballantine Books in North America, on July 21st.
Next month, 
Hello – yes! I have been asked by the fabulous owner of Civillian Reader to share an annotated excerpt from my forthcoming novel Glitterati, which is a dystopian satire about fashion, family and the feckless billionaire class.
It was the cover for These Prisoning Hills that first drew my attention to this upcoming novella by Christopher Rowe. With an intriguing premise, if the story is as moody as that image, I’m definitely in. Here’s the synopsis:
I wrote The Annual Migration of Clouds all in a rush in 2019 after seeing a single tweet from an entomologist I followed (I didn’t even read the paper right away!) containing the phrase ‘heritable symbiont.’ My imagination yanked the reins from my hands and went galloping across a blank document I think literally hours later; dimly I suspected the paper was probably about Wolbachia, a bacterial genus that inhabits some insects and affects their reproduction and behaviour, but I was too excited about the possibilities for a human disease. And ofcourse there are human diseases and syndromes caused by infections that affect our behaviour, as well as examples in various other species (Cordyceps is the obvious one, but there’s also Toxoplasmosis, many infections that cross the blood-brain barrier, certain parasitic infections of the gut, etc).
What happens when a corporate hunter is deemed obsolete…?
Let’s start with an introduction: Who is Sammy H.K. Smith?
An unnerving, sharply observed and altogether too plausible novella
Reinvents the pulp Western with an explicitly antifascist, near-future story of queer identity.
Civilian Reader 