REDDER DAYS
DOUBLEDAY MARCH 11TH 2021
Twins Anna and Adam live in an abandoned commune in a volatile landscape where they prepare for the world-ending event they believe is imminent. Adam keeps watch by day, Anna by night. They meet at dawn and dusk. Their only companion is Koan, the commune's former leader, who still exerts a malignant control over their daily rituals. But when one of the previous inhabitants returns, everything Anna and Adam thought they knew to be true is thrown into question. Dazzling, unsettling and incredibly moving, Redder Days is a stunning exploration of the consequences of corrupted power, the emotional impact of abandonment, and the endurance of humanity in the most desperate of situations.
'So immense and beautiful, it's both gorgeously composed and an addictive page-turner. Sue Rainsford is an extraordinary writer' DONAL RYAN
'Unnervingly, thrillingly strange . . . a masterpiece of literary horror' CAL FLYN
'Lyrical, hypnotic and provocative, I devoured Redder Days in a single, slightly furious sitting and have been haunted by it ever since' JAN CARSON
FOLLOW ME TO GROUND
‘Sick is sick is sick. It’s got to go somewhere.’
Ada, a girl who hasn’t gone quite to plan, and Father live a quiet life together, in a clearing in the woods outside of town. They spend their years tending to local Cures – the human folk who come to them, cautiously, with various ailments, and for whom they care little.
Ada embarks on a disquieting relationship with a local Cure named Samson, much to the displeasure of her father and Samson’s widowed, pregnant sister. When Ada is forced to choose between her old and new lives, what she does will change the town – and The Ground itself – forever.
Follow Me To Ground is an unnerving, beautifully controlled tour-de-force, a sinister tale that questions our preconceptions of predator and prey and the consequences of unchecked desire.
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Recipient of the Kate O’Brien Award (2019) and long-listed for The Desmond Elliott Award and Republic of Consciousness Award, Follow Me To Ground is available from New Island Books (IE), Doubleday Books (UK) and with Scribner (US).
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Palm Beach Post, Buzzfeed, and LitHub's Most Anticipated of 2020
One of AV Club's New Books to Read This January
A Daily Break January Latest Read
One of Tor.com's All New Genre-Bending Books Coming Out in January!
Named a Best Book of 2019 by The Guardian and The Irish Times
“Refreshingly, the novel disregards the predilections of contemporary literary fiction and instead veers toward allegory…What’s best in the novel is its idiosyncratic vision of the meaning of girlhood and first love…The tale pulses with images of opening and entering, into the ground, into patients’ bodies, in sexual union. The suggestion is that a teenage crush is an experience of haunting and being haunted, and that maturity comes through a process of utter, ruinous self-absorption.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Sue Rainsford’s fresh and exciting first novel, Follow Me to Ground, reads like a dark fairy tale…a pleasure to read. Seeing the world from Ada’s perspective is intoxicating, and as she grows in her power, we feel lucky to be taken along for the ride. With language that’s visceral and jarringly beautiful, Rainsford has created a mysterious world that left me wanting to hear more tales of the strange healers and their trusting Cures.”
—BookPage
"Rainsford's protagonists, beings of the "Ground," live in isolation in the woods, tolerated by nearby villagers for their magical healing powers. Underworld elements keep creeping into this moody fairy tale, but a young woman's liberation is the main, intriguing attraction."
—Entertainment Weekly, 20 must-read books for January
"This wildly inventive story reads like a centuries’ old myth you can’t believe you’ve never heard before, and [Rainsford's] prose will hold you captive like a spider’s thread."
—LitHub, Most Anticipated of 2020
“An astonishing debut heralding the career of an exciting new writer. Strange, lyrical, and arresting, this novel will draw readers into its extraordinary spell.”
—Kirkus, starred review
“In this exhilaratingly original work, lyrical prose gives voice to the strange and alluring Ada, whose spellbinding account alternates with the Cures’ testimonials. Seductive and finally horrific; highly recommended.”
—Library Journal, starred review
“Brimming with dark folklore and underworld energy, Rainsford’s stellar debut features a memorable heroine chafing against her monstrous isolation…Rainsford excels in describing the grotesque beauty of…alternative medicine in which the humming healers feel their “way to the pitch of [the patient’s] hurt”…This is a subtle, unsettling novel in which desire is an ineradicable sickness that can be preferable to health.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Haunting ... With an evocative novel bending fantasy into a universe of subtle horror and bodies cracking open to be healed, Rainsford pulls the reader into a frightening, tangible world of monstrosity, humanity, and healing."
—Booklist
"Like all the best horror, it’s an impressive balancing act between judicious withholding and unnerving reveals: you don’t want to go into it knowing too much ... Always singularly and entirely itself."
—The Guardian
"Beautiful and terrifying."
—The Sunday Times
"Sue Rainsford’s Follow Me to Ground is a triumph of imagination and myth-bending—a weird, tender, haunted and deeply affecting spectacle, equal parts beauty and horror, and unlike anything you will read this year."
—Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger's Wife and Inland
“A tangled, gnarled, wonderfully original, strange, beautiful beast of a book. I will be reading everything Rainsford ever writes.”
—Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under
"Sue Rainsford has written a gorgeous and unsettling novel. Follow Me To Ground is a fresh and primal exploration of bodies and healing, of the fight between one's calling and most ardent desires. A stunningly original debut."
—Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise and Almost Famous Women
"Sue Rainsford’s Follow Me to Ground carries both the great force of myth and the clarity of song. In Ada, her father, and in their shape-shifting, unforgettable journey, we are given a merciless chronicle of this bright, wounded world. This is a novel that burns beautifully, that dives to levels we are blind to, and soars."
—Paul Yoon, author of Once the Shore and The Mountain
“Sue Rainsford’s talent is fierce, palpable, and hypnotic … a dazzlingly troubling dream.”
—Colin Barrett, author of Young Skins
‘The body is central to her novel—its horror, its abjections, the way it supports and fails us, the way we give it up to others, the way we claw it back.’ —The Irish Times
‘Strange, but wonderful. Lyrical, and utterly compelling.’ —Irish Examiner
‘Stark, poetic, shocking and quite beautiful, this short novel has an echo of Steinbeck about it, if Steinbeck had written dark, mysterious fairy tales.’ – Sunday Independent
‘Rainsford writes beautifully with a lyrical, earthy prose which is evocative and eviscerating yet mesmerising. She gives Ada a unique voice which fills and haunts the narrative. One of the strangest books I’ve read in a long time, it is utterly compelling and will linger, uninvited, in your consciousness long after you’ve turned the last page.’ —Irish Independent
‘Sue Rainsford’s debut novel is short and extremely unsettling: think Shirley Jackson meets the Brothers Grimm…it evokes a kind of crawling physical unease that straddles the divide between fairy tale and horror.’ —Bookmunch
‘Reminiscent of the work of Alexandra Kleeman, Carmen Maria Machado, and Han Kang, it’s a sinister, sensual, haunted book’. —Lithub
‘Bound in imagination and riveting from start to finish, Rainsford dips into the magical as easily as she works with the ‘weird’…A deliciously odd debut that never wavers in its strangeness and is all the better for it…‘Follow Me to Ground’ is a clever piece of fiction – and a worthy read for anyone who enjoys the disturbed.’ —Storgy
In this dark, moody, sometimes tense, could-not-put-it-down novel tackles—with clever subtlety—our perception of the body and its limitations, sickness, sexuality, and patriarchal norms…Follow Me doesn’t really fit into any strict genre. The eerie, misty landscape; the narrative; and, of course, the ground aren’t easily forgotten.’ —Goop
‘Her writing is poetic and sumptuous; her world is an easy one to step into…Sue Rainsford has quite prodigious talent. From the relatively gentle start to the malevolent end, this début will keep a discerning reader in a happy, hypnotic state.’ —Books Ireland
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