Sarah Maria Griffin & Rose Keating

During a grocery run to her local shopping centre in Sarah Maria Griffin’s new novel Eat the Ones You Love, Shell Pine sees a ‘HELP NEEDED’ sign in a flower shop window. She’s just left her fiancé, lost her job, and moved home to her parents’ house. She has to make a change and bring some good into her life, so she goes inside and takes a chance. Shell realizes right away that flowers are just the good thing she’s been looking for, as is Neve, the beautiful florist who wrote the sign asking for help. The thing is, Neve needs help more than Shell could possibly imagine. An orchid growing out of sight in the heart of the mall is watching them closely. His name is Baby, and the beautiful florist belongs to him. He’s young, he’s hungry, and he’ll do just about anything to make sure he can keep growing big and strong. Nothing he eats – nobody he eats – can satisfy him, except the thing he most desires. Neve. He adores her and wants to consume her, and will stop at nothing to eat the one he loves.

‘It’s been an excellent few years for gothic novels, and Eat the Ones You Love is among the best I’ve read. It’s certainly the most fun. Gorgeous, bewitching, full of heart and secrets and smarts, it kept me up late and turned my dreams strange.’ Kelly Link, bestselling author of The Book of Love

‘Decadent, heartfelt, delicious, dark, broken, sweet, and horrifying, this book is a journey of verdant, blooming love and creeping terror not to be missed.’ Delilah S. Dawson, New York Times-bestselling author of Bloom and Guillotine

Oddbody is a collection of ten bold and unsettling short stories that confront themes of desire, fear and shame, each one asking how far the bounds of the human form can be pushed, stretched – and subverted. A woman finds herself navigating a co-dependent relationship with a ghost. A waitress gives birth to an egg during her breakfast shift. A doctor puts his patient on a cleanse to ‘purify’ her mind, body and soul. Through playful but provocative prose, Rose Keating traverses a realm both dreamlike and nightmarish, exposing – to the bone – the absurdities and horrors of the feminine experience. Oddbody prods a finger at societal norms, gleefully turns familiar tropes on their head and announces Rose as an audacious new voice in Irish fiction.

‘Truth is stranger than fiction; this is stranger than both. Yet our tender, prickling, ungainly human condition beautifully shimmers from these stories the more surreal they get, and in a relatable everyday way. A brilliant debut about our curious existence that would have been notable at any time in history, by an author we can expect to celebrate again.’

DBC Pierre, winner of the Man Booker Prize and author of Vernon God Little