Kerry Hadley-Pryce, "God's Country"

Kerry Hadley-Pryce was born in the Black Country. She worked nights in a Wolverhampton petrol station before becoming a secondary school teacher. A leading exponent of ‘Black Country noir,’ her previous Salt novels were substantial critical successes and helped popularise Gothic writing from the Black Country. She wrote her first novel, The Black Country, whilst studying for an MA in Creative Writing at the Manchester Writing School, for which she gained a distinction and for which she was awarded the Michael Schmidt Prize for outstanding achievement. Her second novel Gamble was shortlisted for the Encore Second Novel Award. She has had several short stories published both in print and online. She has just completed a PhD in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. God’s Country is her third novel. She lives in Stourbridge and tweets @kerry2001

About God's Country, by Kerry Hadley-Pryce

In God’s Country, Guy Flood returns to the Black Country with his girlfriend, Alison, to attend his identical twin brother’s funeral. The reasons he left, and the secrets he left behind, slowly become clear. A chilling dark fiction, dominated by unknown and all-seeing narrator.

You can read more about God's Country on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From God's Country

Guy looked at her, and she’ll say she knew that look well. She’ll tell how she rubbed her fingertips lightly and briefly on the outside of his thigh. 

‘Oh, Christ, Guy…’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.’ 

Guy sighed. He would have sighed instead of saying anything.

‘That was thoughtless, me saying something like that,’ she said. ‘I’m really sorry.’

Ahead of them, she’ll say the traffic had just begun to move. They would have been able to see it begin to shift, like the vertebrae of an enormous monster that they were part of, and up ahead, the blue lights of the fire engines, the police cars. 

‘I really am,’ Alison said, and she would have been squeezing his thigh, and her breath would have been chemical with thirst. ‘I’m an idiot for saying that.’ 

She’ll say now, she just needed to keep him on-side. 

Don’t feel sorry for her.

She’ll tell how she remembers Guy finding first gear, saying, ‘Thank Christ for that,’ and how he was concentrating on the horizon, leaning forward, seeming to want to push forward physically. She would have taken hold of his fingers if she could have, if she could have brought herself to, that is, but both his hands were on the wheel, and it was late, and nobody wants to be late for their own brother’s funeral, especially when it’s your twin brother ...

Heidi James, "The Sound Mirror"

 

Heidi James is the author of critically acclaimed novels Wounding, So the Doves (a Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month) and The Sound Mirror. She won The Saboteur Award for her novella, The Mesmerist’s Daughter, and was a finalist in The Cinnamon Poetry Collection Prize. Her short stories, poetry and essays have been published various anthologies and magazines including, among others, We’ll Never Have Paris, Somesuch, Dazed and Confused and Galley Beggar Press. She hosts a podcast, First Graft, where she discusses the writing process with other writers. Her website is here.

About The Sound Mirror

Tamara is going to kill her mother, but she isn’t a monster. She just has to finish what began at birth and put an end to the damage encoded in her blood.

Quitting her job in Communications, Tamara dresses carefully and hires a car to visit her mother for the last time. Accompanied by a chorus of ancestors, she is harried by voices from the past and the future that reveal the secrets of these women’s lives that continue to echo through her own.

Is Tamara fated to make the same mistakes as her ancestors or can she break the cycle and lead her own life, and on her terms too?

The Sound Mirror is a haunting novel that avoids classification. Spanning three generations from British Occupied India to Southern England, Heidi James has crafted a moving examination of class, war, violence and shame from the rich details of ordinary lives.

From The Sound Mirror, by Heidi James

TAMARA

She is going to kill her mother today. But she’s no monster. She’s not the villain. It’s a beautiful day for it, winter sharp, the sky an unfussy blue. She’s taken two days holiday from work and hired a fancy car, a Mercedes, essential for this journey, where appearances and a quick getaway are everything. The man gave her a discount when she told him where she was going. The two-hundred-mile round trip will be a breeze. She’s dressed carefully too; just jeans and a shirt, but they are expensive, well-cut. Understated, but a signal to those in the know. So here we are, driving down to be face to face with her for the last time. Of course, we’re along for the ride, how could we not?

It’s been a long time coming, and our fault, we should say. Funny that, speaking with one voice now, agreeing with each other. But yes, our fault, and all the others, tangled up with poisons and infections and rottenness. Our mothers and mother’s mothers containing us, we, in their bellies, seeds of each in the cells and the breath. Before the splitting in two, the doubling like an atomic bomb and now she holds us all, a rabble of ancestors, pressing up from inside against her skin, and too, she contains the next generation, if she wanted. If she can bear to, bear it, bear a child. Who could blame her if not? But for now, she’s the sum of all us women, the total. She is what’s left.  

You imagine history trails you like clanging tin cans on a wedding car, but you’re wrong. History is a halter that leads, we’re beasts of burden with a ring through our nose. You go where we lead. We are not whole, we are fragments, ununified, unstable entities colliding under the swirling universe. Overflowing with memories and feelings not our own; archives of those who came before. It’s almost romantic, imagining we’re individuals, cut off from the rest, making ourselves feel special. What we are is the story she is made of. Then of course, there’s free will, if you believe in that, which she does. It’s a nice idea anyway. That we are free to choose our actions, and the consequences. 

Passive, she drifts where she’s pushed, lifted and dropped. Caught in tides she can’t fathom, impulses and currents she can’t navigate.