Tor.com Publishing is delighted to announce the acquisition of World English rights for Flyaway, a debut novella by Kathleen Jennings.
In a small Western Queensland town, a reserved young woman receives a note from one of her missing brothers—a note that makes question her memories of their disappearance and her father’s departure. Slowly, after reluctantly seeking help from two old schoolmates, she begins to unravel the truth of her own past and what lies her mother may have told her.
Transformation, enchantment, and the emotional truths of family history teem in Kathleen Jennings’ stunning debut.
Kathleen Jennings is a writer and illustrator in Brisbane, Australia. She was raised on fairy tales on a cattle station in Western Queensland, and practiced as a translator and a lawyer (which is all stories, isn’t it?) before returning to undertake a Master of Philosophy in Creative Writing (Australian Gothic Literature) at the University of Queensland. Her short stories have appeared on Tor.com, in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, in anthologies from Candlewick, Ticonderoga and Fablecroft Publishing, and elsewhere. As an illustrator, she has been shortlisted for one Hugo and three World Fantasy Awards, and has won several Ditmars.
Said the author:
When I was small, the books available painted pictures of two landscapes: a lovely, green, myth-haunted North, and desperately grim Australian landscapes of terror and fire and a “dead red heart.” But I loved the countryside where I grew up: it glinted and glimmered, and before I knew the bloody history of my own district, I learned to view it through a net of those borrowed enchantments. Flyaway, although set in a fictional part of the country, is about that terrible, thrilling beauty, and also a little about the power and danger of ignorance and imposed tales. I’m honoured and delighted that it will be published by Tor.com Publishing.
Said editor Ellen Datlow:
I’ve known Kathleen Jennings for several years now. First as an artist whose distinctive work, especially her cut-paper silhouettes, have graced book covers for a number of publishing houses since 2009. More recently, I became aware that she’s also a talented short story writer, and I acquired her charmingly weird fantasy “The Heart of Owl Abbas” for Tor.com. So, I’m over the moon to have acquired her engrossing dark fantasy novella, Flyaway. I think it will please fans of her fiction and of her fiction, as incidental drawings in her instantly recognizable style run throughout the book.
