The Drowned A Short Story

There is a town that brews a strange intoxicant from a rare fruit called the deathberry—and once a year a handful of citizens are selected to drink it. . . . There is a life lived beneath the water—among rotted buildings and bloated corpses—by those so overburdened by the world's demands that they simply give up and go under. . . . In this mesmerizing blend of the familiar and the fantastic, multiple award-winning New York Times notable author Jeffrey Ford creates true wonders and infuses the mundane with magic. In tales marked by his distinctive, dark imagery and fluid, exhilarating prose, he conjures up an annual gale that transforms the real into the impossible, invents a strange scribble that secretly unites a significant portion of society, and spins the myriad dreams of a restless astronaut and his alien lover. Bizarre, beautiful, unsettling, and sublime, The Drowned Life showcases the exceptional talents of one of contemporary fiction's most original artists.

The River Lee has always been a part of life – and death – in Cork. Now the bodies of five young men have been found by divers, locked in their car on the riverbed. A tragic accident? Or something more sinister? As the volunteer divers begin the macabre task of extracting the bodies, DCI Katie Maguire investigates a crime where all is not as it seems... What people are saying about THE DROWNED: A SHORT STORY: 'Irrespective of the length of the story, Graham manages to make it compelling reading' 'Every Katie Maguire book that comes out is better than the last' 'A pity it was short, just so absorbing' 'A fantastic read'

When 14-year-old Ruby Carson takes a tumble through the ice she nearly drowns. Coming to, she has a vision of her town under water that she shares with the assembled crowd. Already something of an oddity, the vision solidifies her status as an outcast. But as it turns out she was right ...

Paris, 1800. Theophile has been moldering in an asylum for five years with no clear memory of how he came to be there. He wavers in and out of madness until the day that unseen forces compel him to escape and make his way back home to the haunted Breton coast. As he follows the tatters of memory back to the ungodly events of his childhood, striving to wring sense out of madness, he is pursued in turn by furious crows, drowned witches, a loved one long believed dead, a secret cabal of priests and a damaged orphan. Each carries pieces of a secret that emerges into two distinct but interwining tales of supernatural vengeance. As the ravages of Theophile's buried past catch up with him at last, a battle for power begins, and the stakes are no less than the fate of the lost souls in hell.

The 2008 Mary McCarthy Prize winner, selected by Andrea Barrett. A kind of contemporary Winesburg, Ohio.

This fast-paced narrative by the author of 'Crash' and 'Empire of the Sun' is a stunning evocation of a flooded, tropical London of the near future and a foray into the workings of the unconscious mind.

Explore the wondrous sea and the oddities of human nature in this international bestselling, thrilling epic novel of a Danish port town. Hailed in Europe as an instant classic, We, the Drowned is the story of the port town of Marstal, Denmark, whose inhabitants sailed the world from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War. The novel tells of ships wrecked and blown up in wars, of places of terror and violence that continue to lure each generation; there are cannibals here, shrunken heads, prophetic dreams, and miraculous survivals. The result is a brilliant seafaring novel, a gripping saga encompassing industrial growth, the years of expansion and exploration, the crucible of the first half of the twentieth century, and most of all, the sea. Called “one of the most exciting authors in Nordic literature” by Henning Mankell, Carsten Jensen has worked as a literary critic and a journalist, reporting from China, Cambodia, Latin America, the Pacific Islands, and Afghanistan. He lives in Copenhagen and Marstal. “We, the Drowned sets sail beyond the narrow channels of the seafaring genre and approaches Tolstoy in its evocation of war’s confusion, its power to stun victors and vanquished alike…A gorgeous, unsparing novel.”—Washington Post “A generational saga, a swashbuckling sailor’s tale, and the account of a small town coming into modernity—both Melville and Steinbeck might have been pleased to read it.”—New Republic “Dozens of stories coalesce into an odyssey taut with action and drama and suffused with enough heart to satisfy readers who want more than the breakneck thrills of ships battling the elements.”—Publishers Weekly (starred)

From the depths of the Trident Realms, treachery and war impact the lands of Mantica After a bitter betrayal a young naiad, Ashal, and her bodyguard, are exiled from their home in the watery depths of the Trident Realm. Swearing revenge against those who have wronged her, Ashal begins her quest to seek out and destroy the people responsible for her sorrow. Her journey takes her to the remote Abbey of Danos on the outskirts of the human empire of Basilea where the first on her list has taken up residency. Waiting there will force her to face some uncomfortable truths about herself and the world in which she lives as well as open her eyes to a greater darkness than she had imagined could exist, especially within herself. There are others who seek the same vengeance as her, but should she trust them? Or will her single-minded goal of vengeance blind her to the dangers that await for her at the edge of the Abkhazla Mountains?