We are absolutely thrilled to be welcoming Rivers Solomon for a virtual event to celebrate the arrival of faer hugely anticipated third novel, SORROWLAND. Rivers will be joined in conversation by writer and artist Ama Josephine Budge.

Vern, a Black woman with albinism, is hunted after escaping a religious compound, then she discovers that her body is changing and that she is developing extra-sensory powers.

Alone in the woods, she gives birth to twins and raises them away from the influence of the outside world. But something is wrong – not with them, but with her own body. It’s itching, it’s stronger, it’s… not normal.

To understand her body’s metamorphosis, Vern must investigate not just the secluded religious compound she fled but the violent history of dehumanisation, medical experimentation, and genocide that produced it. In the course of reclaiming her own darkness, Vern learns that monsters aren’t just individuals, but entire histories, systems, and nations.

Rivers Solomon is an anarchist, a dyke, a she-beast, an exile, a shiv, a wreck, and a refugee of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Fae write about life in the margins, where they are much at home.

In addition to appearing on the Stonewall Honor List and winning a Firecracker Award, Solomon’s debut novel AN UNKINDNESS OF GHOSTS was a finalist for a Lambda, a Hurston/Wright, a Tiptree, and a Locus Award, among others. Solomon’s second book, THE DEEP, based on the Hugo-nominated song of the same name by experimental hip-hop group clipping, was the winner of the 2020 Lambda Award and is on the shortlist for a Nebula, Locus, and Hugo award.

Solomon’s short work appears in or is forthcoming from Black Warrior Review, the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Guernica, Best American Short Stories and elsewhere. Fae live in the UK.

Ama Josephine Budge is a Speculative Writer, Artist, Curator and Pleasure Activist whose praxis navigates intimate explorations of race, art, ecology and feminism. Ama’s speculative fiction and essays have been commissioned and published internationally, including by Anathema Spec from the Margins, the Architectural Review, the Feminist Review, Aperture, Whitechapel Gallery and more. Ama was nominated for the 2021 Arts Foundation Environmental Writing Award, and is working on her first novella a speculative meditation on trees, queer erotics and isolation.
Ama is the recipient of the 2020 Local, International and Planetary Fictions Fellowship with Curatorial Frame (Helsinki) and EVA International (Limerick), and will be researching the topic Pleasurable Ecologies – Formations of Care: Curation as Future-building. Ama is also a member of Queer Ecologies, initiator of the Apocalypse Reading Room project and a recipient of 2020 Bernie Grant Micro commission funding.

Join us as we welcome two authors whose respective debut novels have been met with universal acclaim: Chris Power, author of A LONELY MAN, and Lauren Oyler, author of FAKE ACCOUNTS. The event will be streaming via Instagram Live.

Robert is a struggling writer living in Berlin with his wife and two young daughters. One night he meets Patrick, an enigmatic stranger with a sensational story to tell: a ghostwriter for a Russian oligarch – recently found hanged – who is now being followed. But is he really in danger? Patrick’s life strikes Robert as a fabrication, but one that comes to obsess him. He decides to use the other man, and his story.

An elegant and atmospheric twist on the cat-and-mouse narrative, A Lonely Man is a novel of shadows, of the search for identity and the elastic nature of truth. As his association with Patrick hurtles towards tragedy, Robert must decide: are actual events the only things that give a story life, and are some stories too dangerous to tell?

Chris Power is the author of Mothers, which was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. He lives in London. His debut novel, A LONELY MAN, was published by Faber & Faber in April 2021.

On the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, a young woman snoops through her boyfriend’s phone and makes a startling discovery: he’s an anonymous Internet conspiracy theorist, and a popular one at that. Already fluent in Internet fakery, irony, and outrage, she’s not exactly shocked by the revelation. But this is only the first in a series of bizarre twists that expose a world whose truths are shaped by online lies.

Suddenly left with no reason to stay in New York – or be anywhere in particular – she flees to Berlin, and embarks on her own cycles of manipulation in the deceptive spaces of her daily life, from dating apps to expat social events, open-plan offices to bureaucratic waiting rooms.

Narrated in a voice as seductive as it is subtly subversive, Fake Accounts is a wry, provocative and very funny debut novel about identity and authenticity in the age of the internet.

Lauren Oyler is a New York-based writer who was born and raised in West Virginia, and spends a lot of time in Berlin. Her essays on books and culture have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, Harper’s, the Guardian, New York Magazine’s The Cut, Bookforum, the Baffler, the New Republic, and elsewhere. Her first novel, FAKE ACCOUNTS, was published by 4th Estate in February 2021.