Featured publisher: Dead Ink Books
Dead Ink Books is an independent publisher of literary fiction. We publish work from new and emerging authors that we think are brave, bold and different. Our mission is to invest in our authors for the long term and help them grow and develop as they wish. We’re supported by Arts Council England and the regular subscriptions of our readers who invest in our authors and their work.
2017 has been an exciting year for us, we’ve grown at a pace that we’ve barely been able to keep up with. Part of that success was down to Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class by the Working Class. Featuring Kit de Waal and Andrew McMillan, we collected 23 essays from working class writers that examine what being working class means in 21st Century Britain.
That doesn’t mean that our fiction hasn’t played a big part in our growth though! Being from Manchester and now living in Liverpool, we’re really proud to publish some great northerners too! SJ Bradley’s Guest was one of the first books we published this year, a coming of age tale with a difference, a punk squatter’s lifestyle is thrown into disarray once he learns that his father was a policeman infiltrating the green movement.
Sealed by Naomi Booth is a book that we still can’t quite believe we had the opportunity to publish, a visceral eco-horror that is as terrifying and unsettling, as it is beautiful and tender. This brilliant novel of a mother’s fight to survive in a world that has turned against us, where our own bodies are in revolt is a future classic of the genre.
Staying with the horror genre, which we seem to have really fallen in love with this year, is The Night Visitors by Jenn Ashworth and Richard V. Hirst. Written collaboratively as an exchange of emails, this short novella is the gothic melodrama updated for a world of instant communication. This book is a master class in how to construct and pace a narrative towards a brilliant crescendo!
Sparing a moment for those unfortunate authors who don’t live in the North, Gary Budden’s Hollow Shores is another horror, but one that moves in an entirely different direction. Here the horror genre isn’t used to shock or terrify, but to leisurely excavate through landscape the psyche of a nation on the cusp of change. Existing somewhere between a collection and a novel, Budden’s tales are haunted by folklore and monsters, but it is the harshness of our own lives and realities that are the most punishing.
Which brings us finally to a treat available to pre-order for next year. Daniel James is a debut author who has written a novel that exists entirely without regard for boundaries. The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas is a thrilling escapade of hard-boiled detective fiction, but also about ten things more than that. Part narrative, part biography, part newspaper clippings, this book is a puzzle and, once you reach the end, one you might be unwilling to solve!
To find out more about Dead Ink Books and their work visit their website.