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Book Cover for: Honeyeater, Kathleen Jennings

Honeyeater

Kathleen Jennings

A richly imagined dark fantasy that pulses with the beautiful destruction of a town reclaimed by the natural world.

Sub-tropical Bellworth is founded on floodplains and root-bound secrets. And Charlie, remarkable only for vanished friends and a successful sister, plans to leave for good, just as soon as he deals with his dead aunt's house. Then Grace arrives, desperate, with roses pressing up through her skin, and drags Charlie into the ghost-choked mysteries of Bellworth, uncovering the impossible consequences of loss and desire -- and a choice Charlie made when he was a boy.

But peeling back the rumors and lies that cocoon the suburb disturbs more than complacent neighbors and lost souls. And Charlie and Grace are forced to a decision that threatens not only their lives, but all they believed those lives could be.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Tor Books
  • Publish Date: Sep 2nd, 2025
  • Pages: 272
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.45in - 5.78in - 0.96in - 0.79lb
  • EAN: 9781250845887
  • Categories: Fantasy - ContemporaryFantasy - Dark Fantasy

About the Author

Jennings, Kathleen: -

Kathleen Jennings lives in Brisbane, Australia, a subtropical city.

Her Australian Gothic debut, Flyaway, (set in Western Queensland, where she grew up) received a British Fantasy Award (the Sydney J. Bounds Award) and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. She is also the author of a short story collection, Kindling, and a poetry collection, Travelogues: Vignettes from Trains in Motion. In addition, she is a World Fantasy Award-winning illustrator, has previously been a translator and a lawyer, and holds both an MPhil and PhD in creative writing (Australian Gothic literature and creative observation, respectively).

Praise for this book

"Lush and atmospheric, this is an elegant cocktail of flood water and gum trees and secrets that refuse to stay safely drowned. Gorgeously written. I was so busy admiring the writing that I didn't notice how deep the water had gotten or what was growing underneath."--T. Kingfisher, author of Nettle and Bone

"Honeyed, sense-filling prose and a compelling central knowledge of human nature point to something profound underneath the surface of this enchanting novel of time and land." --Paul Cornell, author of Witches of Lychford

"Thorn-hard, sap-full, and totally creeptastic. In Honeyeater, Jennings delivers her fiction like a full-body possession, a drowning dizziness of the senses." --C. S. E. Cooney, author of World Fantasy Award-winning Saint Death's Daughter

"The strangest descent into the dark earth of a family's secrets you'll ever read, glittering and exact and uncanny, rich with rot and perfume, full of bird-calls and waterlogged suburban heat."--Francis Spufford, author of Cahokia Jazz

"Honeyeater is a marvelous demonstration of Kathleen Jennings' gift for creating new legends that make imaginary places feel unnervingly real. It's another terrific yarn by one of the most original writers working today."--Owen King, author of The Curator

"Honeyeater is a Gothic nightmare full of buried secrets and shambling horrors. From the grim lushness of a decaying suburb to the depiction of haunted lives, Jennings's prose has a powerful grip."--Laird Barron, author of The Wind Began to Howl

"Bittersweet and gentle, Honeyeater is a delicate and dream-like novella of ghosts, floods and the tales we tell in the darkness. A vision of suburbia rendered magical and extraordinary by Jennings's deft touch."--Angela Slatter, award-winning author of The Path of Thorns

"Honeyeater, a highly atmospheric senses-saturating story, has an intriguing problem at its heart: What is a person to do when people around them keep turning up dead?"--Elizabeth Knox, author of The Absolute Book

"A quiet tour de force of beauty, mystery, and slowly creeping horror, full of characters--living, dead, and not quite either--who are as beautifully rendered as the strangely ordinary town they occupy. I'll be haunted by it for some time to come."--Delia Sherman, author of The Evil Wizard Smallbone

"An intricate and elegant tale that burrows under the reader's skin and breathes creepy new life into the modern ghost story." --Thomas Lloyd, author of The Stormcaller

Praise for Flyaway

"A fairytale wrapped about in riddles and other thorny bits of enchantments and stories, but none of them quite like any you've heard before. Kathleen Jennings' prose dazzles, and her magic feels real enough that you might even prick your finger on it." --Kelly Link

"Half mystery, half fairy tale, all exquisitely rendered and full of teeth." --Holly Black

"Achingly gorgeous. . . . As tangled and densely interwoven as a tuft of dusty fur snagged on a barbed wire fence, Jennings' debut novella is both deeply indebted to the Australian gothic tradition and vibrantly, bewitchingly itself. A dark, delicious shrike's feast of a fairy tale." --Brooke Bolander

"I feel as if a very new voice has whispered a very old secret in my ear, and I'll never be able to un-hear it. Nor will I ever want to." --C. S. E. Cooney

"Shirley Jackson Down Under: a brooding, bruising fairy tale about blood and history and sharp-toothed things waiting in the woods. I loved it." --Alix E. Harrow