£12.99
To be published on 10 May 2022
The Australian novelist and playwright Helen de Guerry Simpson (1897-1940) published many supernatural short stories. This new edition selects the best of her unsettling writing, adding some little-known stories to her 1925 collection The Baseless Fabric.
Featured stories include:
‘An Experiment of the Dead’, in which a visitor comes to visit a woman in the condemned cell.
‘Good Company’, in which a traveller in Italy becomes temporarily possessed by a hitchhiker in her mind.
‘Grey Sand and White Sand’ is the horrifying story of a demented landscape artist who paints what only he can see.
‘The Outcast’, in which a soldier left for dead in the War takes his revenge on his village.
‘The Rite’, in which a discontented woman enters a wood, and emerges transformed.
We will be publishing this fine collection as a paperback and as an ebook.
Our books are available in bookshops worldwide: please ask your bookshop to order our books through Two Rivers / Ingram.
We regret that, due to changes in trading agreements, the VAT administration required for us to send books direct to customers outside the UK who order from our website has become too much for a small business to manage. We can still send books direct to customers in the UK, in the USA and in Canada, but for the moment we have stopped despatching books elsewhere in the world. We’re really sorry about this, and hope this can be changed in the future. If this affects you, please order our books from your bookshop instead!
Pre-order the paperback edition direct from us (it comes with an exclusive bookmark) by adding it to your cart below, and pay by PayPal or UK bank transfer.
You can also pay in euros and US dollars. Please email us at enquiries@handheldpress.co.uk to be sent the details for our euro and dollar accounts, and we will organise your order that way.
Pre-orders will be posted when we receive the book from the printer, which is likely to be one to two months ahead of the publication date.
Have you seen our thrilling postcards? You can inspect and order them here.
UK: £12.99 (free p&p)
Canada and USA: £12.99 plus varying p&p shown at checkout
All our packaging is paper-based, renewable and recyclable.
Description
Helen de Guerry Simpson was born in Sydney, New South Wales, in 1897, and studied at Oxford. Her novel Boomerang won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1932. She died from cancer in 1940. Her close friend, the novelist Margaret Kennedy, took charge of Simpson’s daughter Clemence during the war while Simpson was in her last illness. Clemence and Simpson both feature in Kennedy’s wartime memoir, Where Stands A Winged Sentry, also published by Handheld Press.
The Introduction is by Melissa Edmundson, the leading scholar of women’s Weird fiction and supernatural writing from the early 20th century.
You may also be interested in these supernatural collections
Women’s Weird: the original anthology edited by Melissa Edmundson. Contains thirteen excellent supernatural stories encompassing the boundaries of Weird by outstanding women authors. Includes stories by Edith Wharton, May Sinclair, Margery Lawrence and E Nesbit.
Women’s Weird 2: our second anthology edited by Melissa Edmundson, this collection of short supernatural fiction from 1893 to 1937 covers new geographical territory with fiction from Canada, Australia, India, the USA and New Zealand.
British Weird: edited by James Machin, this collection of short British supernatural fiction from 1981 to 1937 displays an unsettling mastery of Weird preoccupations.
The Villa and The Vortex, by Elinor Mordaunt: we bring this exceptionally good writer of Weird fiction back into print in September 2021 with this new anthology of her best supenatural writing.
