PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Katharine Beutner is an assistant professor of English at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Her first novel, Alcestis, won the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award in 2011 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Association's Lesbian Debut Fiction Award. Her writing has appeared in Tinfish, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Toast and other publications. Recently, she received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. She is the editor in chief of The Dodge, a magazine of eco-writing and translation, and lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
KILLINGLY moves deliberately, achingly, through one young woman's disappearance in 1897. Out of the real-life facts of the case, Katharine Beutner makes extraordinary fiction, pushing against the limits of her characters' situations and propelling us to the heights of their ambitions. Beutner's novel is able to discover an answer to Bertha Mellish's mystery. Now, more than ever, we need to know the truth this story reveals. -- Julia Phillips, author of National Book Award Finalist Disappearing Earth Katharine Beutner has spun a lost scrap of history into a campus mystery novel set in the late 1800s, when an elite women's college is consumed by the search for a missing student. Gossip and clues to her whereabouts-or her death-fester with accusation and suspicion. In their longing to find the beloved young woman, her best friend Agnes and her older sister Florence must each grapple with their own dangerous secrets. A story of women who defy strict rules, Killingly is a gripping novel of intrigue and surprising twists. -- Kate Manning This is a superb novel, suffused with dread, riddled with covert motivations and desires, reckoning with painful secrets, artfully rendering the myriad facets of this mysterious case while bearing witness to the sacrifices many women have made to live-and die-authentically. -- -Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Dog of the North and The Portable Veblen
