The Red Dancer

When Margaretha Zelle, a young woman living in The Hague, answers a lonely hearts advertisement she becomes drawn into a relationship with an army captain twice her age. After a hasty wedding, they depart for Indonesia, where the marriage collapses amid infidelity and violence. Seeking a new life, Margaretha returns to Europe and travels to Paris, where she adopts the stage name Mata Hari, reinventing herself as an exotic dancer. In her new role she attracts the attention of numerous admirers, many of whom are officers, ready to share their secrets with a woman of notorious allure and intrigue, as Europe lurches towards explosive conflict.

The Red Dancer opens in 1895 when, as a young woman in Amsterdam, Margaretha Zelle answers a lonely-hearts advertisement placed by a soldier twice her age in a local newspaper. But her marriage to Captain McLeod of the Dutch army ends in tragedy and acrimony and she leaves their posting in Indonesia. Heading for Paris, she adopts the stage name Mata Hari - 'Eye of the Morning' - and reinvents herself as an exotic dancer. Mata Hari's fame soon spreads throughout the cabarets and theatres of Europe and, as the major powers lurch towards inevitable conflict, she begins to attract the attention of numerous admirers - many of whom are officers, all too keen to share their secrets with a woman of notorious intrigue and allure. Set against the dramatically imagined backdrop of pre-War Europe, Richard Skinner's novel weaves interlinking chapters of fiction and non-fiction to conjure up the life, loves and tragic end of a woman who continues to fascinate almost a century on from her death.

While in a fine state of total inebriation, Gabriel drained his vein onto a sand dune and perceived a most perfect being. A godlike image appeared on a starless night while in country. This powerful force would permit him safe passage through the conflict if he would replace an eyelash lost in a child's dream and return to the "world" or home with the souls of his dead comrades. His five-year-old niece had given him an earring for good luck before he left for the war. He wore the black crescent shape on a silver chain around his neck alongside a Saint Christopher medal. This earring made it possible for him to return home with the souls of his more unfortunate companions. Back from Southeast Asia, he enters a saloon in New York City and chats with the owner. He mentions he had served overseas. This man asks for a quiet moment and summons the patrons to propose a toast. No one takes him seriously as he is in his cups. When the bartender turns up the jukebox, the room resumes its convivial atmosphere of the '60s free love and introspection. Realizing he is not amused, he leaves for an evening with a war buddy and his young family. It's the commencement of his postwar experience with souls in tow. He finds solace with his body wasted. "My body's aching and I can't find my way home," like the song plays out. His years pass with no great interests, and he gets by well enough with a day-to-day existence but has accomplished nothing but keeps himself in blue-collar work and in more barrooms. When he meets up with a wealthy acquaintance from a tiny Midwest college they had attended, he thinks of him as a shimmering deity of sorts. Wings, the handsome poet who drove his hunter green Morgan sports car through Lake Forest's bright autumn afternoons down Sheridan Road scattering bushels of fallen leaves with selfless irony, a smirk and no smile, now conversed regularly with Gabriel who thinks him quite the fellow in the sense that anyone with that amount of wealth should be able to do the greatest things. Wings had married while still in college, and his wife gave birth to a daughter who kept him out of the draft. The child was another man's progeny. Wings too had to survive the war. His conversation of manuscripts, investments, inheritance, love entanglements with no resolution or sense didn't matter to Gabriel. It made him feel wealthy by association. One evening on a walk through Central Park, they and Wings' daughter, Ruth, sat in a clearing to enjoy a bottle of wine. She slips a pill into Gabriel's cup without him batting an eye as they were out to enjoy themselves. Wings leaves abruptly. Ruth follows shortly. As night falls, he finally goes in search of his two friends. He approaches a big man cloaked in an animal skin who is armed with a large broad sword. Gabriel inquires about his friends and is aggressively attacked. In short order, he has this man on his knees crying for help, which he can't see. A woman comes to the fallen man's aid, but he mistakenly strikes her with his weapon. The former marine awakens the next the morning and is arrested for the death of a woman not far from him. He is released on bail and is presented with the opportunity of taking the fall. After a short term in a psychiatric hospital, he would be recompensed with a rather large sum of money. Wings had arranged this to collect monies for himself and his daughter. His wife had gone through his fortune. Gabriel had never dreamed of such machinations. His honor is at stake as that of his fellow war companions. He decides to make a stand and dons an expensive navy blue suit over his service automatic and grabs a dagger. On his way to Wings' coop, he finds himself walking through Central Park. The intense clamoring of his men on his mind causes him to stumble and fall for an instant. He shakes it off but doesn't know who he is. In the waning daylight, he wanders through a sett

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • From the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me, a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom. “This potent book about America’s most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi Coates] as a first-rate novelist.”—San Francisco Chronicle IN DEVELOPMENT AS A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • Adapted by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kamilah Forbes, directed by Nia DaCosta, and produced by MGM, Plan B, and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time • NPR • The Washington Post • Chicago Tribune • Vanity Fair • Esquire • Good Housekeeping • Paste • Town & Country • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her—but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known. So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram’s resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures. This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children—the violent and capricious separation of families—and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today’s most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen. Praise for The Water Dancer “Ta-Nehisi Coates is the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race with his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me. So naturally his debut novel comes with slightly unrealistic expectations—and then proceeds to exceed them. The Water Dancer . . . is a work of both staggering imagination and rich historical significance. . . . What’s most powerful is the way Coates enlists his notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound that never seems to heal. . . . Timeless and instantly canon-worthy.”—Rolling Stone

What moves the wheels of Hume's detective stories to perfection are the ambiguous relationships of the characters, all, or most of whom are suspects, skillfully narrated by the author, who thus succeeds in immersing the reader in the thickest mystery. This is also what happens in 'The Dancer in Red'.

Aurora Award Finalist. Alexander King has everything--wealth, power, a business empire over which he rules. But lately, the corporate game in which he excels has lost its thrill for him. He needs a new game. And then, on the crowded streets of Toronto, in the dead cold of winter, she appears before him. The Dancer. Achingly beautiful, half-naked, and dancing to a song that only she and King seem to hear, she becomes King’s new obsession, an obsession that draws him into a journey through a secret world hidden within the city he thought he knew...and to a very special club. "'The Dancer at the Red Door,' with its mix of oblique horror, urban fantasy, and monsters ... recalls British horror novelist Clive Barker at his most disturbingly fanciful." —Quill and Quire "An excellent story ... urban fantasy at its best." —Fantasy Book Critic "...intriguing meditation on escapism...evoking Gaiman's Neverwhere, the obligatory helping of Lovecraft, plus a touch of something like Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut" —Strange Horizons "Just as the song of the city leads King throughout his journey, so too does it lead the reader throughout Douglas Smith's beautifully crafted 'The Dancer at the Red Door.' The writing is lean and evocative; every element of the story works double-time as setting informs character, action creates mood, and nothing is superfluous. The song becomes a living, breathing creature which, more so than hearing, I could feel viscerally as I read Doug's wonderful story. Highly, highly recommended." —Rainbow Dragon Recommends

A fate-reading dancer struggles to make her most important vision come true. Everyone in Dzune had always assumed Tay could tell fortunes, that her milky eyes let her see what others couldn't. Villagers brought gifts in exchange for her wisdom and treated it as the ironclad word of the Sun Father. There was only one problem: Tay couldn't actually see the future. Not at all initially, and only a little after her awakening. She'd had a true vision once, though, an image of her—armed and angry—safeguarding a strange man on a green hill. And now that man had come to Dzune. Please note: - The Battle Dancer won an Honorable Mention from the Writers of the Future Contest in 2014. - This novella doesn’t fully resolve on its own—it’s meant as a lead-in to The Red Wraith.