Not sure about The Empty Room, I do love the sprayed edges though.
Wild and Wicked Things is a witchy Sapphic retelling of Gatsby? I’m so here for this book I can’t cope! It’s got kind of mixed reviews but everyone seems to agree that it’s atmospheric AF and sometimes that can be enough. I’m excited to find out.
April Prem1er – The Empty Room by Brian McGilloway
Prem1er subscription details can be found here.
She opened a Pandora’s box of betrayal and deceit
Pandora – Dora – Conlon wakes one morning to discover her 17-year old daughter Ellie, has not come home after a party.
The day Ellie disappears, Dora is alone as her husband Eamon has already left for the day in his job as a long-distance lorry driver. So Dora does the usual things: rings around Ellie’s friends… but no one knows where she is. Her panic growing, Dora tries the local hospitals and art college where Ellie is a student – but then the police arrive on her doorstep with the news her daughter’s handbag has been discovered dumped in a layby.
So begins Dora’s ordeal of waiting and not knowing what has become of her girl. Eamon’s lack of empathy and concern, Dora realises, is indicative of the state of their marriage, and left on her own, Dora begins to reassess everything she thought she knew about her family and her life. Increasingly isolated and disillusioned with the police investigation, Dora feels her grip on reality slipping as she takes it upon herself to find her daughter – even if it means tearing apart everything and everybody she had ever loved, and taking justice into her own hands.
The Empty Room by Brian McGilloway
April GSFF – Wild and Wicked Things by Francesca May
Waitlist for the GSFF subscription and buying options for previous picks can be found here.
In the aftermath of World War I, a naive woman is swept into a glittering world filled with dark magic, romance, and murder in this lush and decadent debut.
On Crow Island, people whisper, real magic lurks just below the surface.
Neither real magic nor faux magic interests Annie Mason. Not after it stole her future. She’s only on the island to settle her late father’s estate and, hopefully, reconnect with her long-absent best friend, Beatrice, who fled their dreary lives for a more glamorous one.
Yet Crow Island is brimming with temptation, and the biggest one may be her enigmatic new neighbor.
Mysterious and alluring, Emmeline Delacroix is a figure shadowed by rumors of witchcraft. And when Annie witnesses a confrontation between Bea and Emmeline at one of the island’s extravagant parties, she is drawn into a glittering, haunted world. A world where the boundaries of wickedness are tested, and the cost of illicit magic might be death.
Wild and Wicked Things by Francesca May
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