Spoilt Creatures: An Observer Best Debut of 2024 - 'compelling, cultish and utterly feral' Alice Slater

Kiran Millwood Hargrave's The Mercies is a simmering debut, heady with the possibilities of language and the righteousness of female rage. Jennifer Saint's Ariadne is a modern-day Dionysian cult of women in the woods, haunting and exhilarating. Alice Slater's Death of a Bookseller is a remote farm tucked away in the Kent Downs, a safe space for women. When Iris meets Hazel, she finds herself drawn into the possibility of a new start away from the world of men. However, power struggles, cruelty, and transgressions threaten their precarious way of life. Spoilt Creatures is an intoxicating debut about transgression, sisterhood, and the seductive nature of obsession, pulling back the skin of patriarchal violence and examining the female rage that lurks beneath.

Format: Hardback
Length: 336 pages
Publication date: 06 June 2024
Publisher: Headline Publishing Group

A simmering debut, heady with the possibilities of language and the righteousness of female rage, Kiran Millwood Hargrave's The Mercies is a lush and dreamlike sweltering novel where the sunlight pulses with nightmarish dread. Colin Walsh's Kala is a modern-day Dionysian cult of women in the woods, haunting and exhilarating. Jennifer Saint's Ariadne is Emma Cline's The Girls meets Lord of the Flies. Alice Slater's Death of a Bookseller is compelling, cultish, and utterly feral.

They thought they knew everything about us. The kind of women we were. It was a place for women. A remote farm tucked away in the Kent Downs. A safe space.

When Iris, newly single and living at home with her mother, meets the mysterious and beguiling Hazel, who lives in a women's commune, she finds herself drawn into the possibility of a new start away from the world of men who have only let her down. Here, at Breach House, the women can be loud and dirty, live and eat abundantly, all while under the leadership of their gargantuan matriarch, Blythe.

But even among the women, there are power struggles, cruelty, and transgressions that threaten their precarious way of life. When a group of men arrives on the farm, the commune's existence is thrown into question, hurling Iris and the other women towards an act of devastating violence.

Fierce and unapologetic, Spoilt Creatures is an intoxicating debut about transgression, sisterhood, and the seductive nature of obsession. It pulls back the skin of patriarchal violence and examines the female rage that lurks beneath.

Weight: 540g
Dimension: 242 x 164 x 32 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781035407910