Two of Adlisa’s sisters have been selected to serve, adopting the role of dutiful daughter to the dark Lady who rules the manor. Two of Adlisa’s sisters were eaten, devoured when the Lady’s fixations soured and they were deemed expendable.
Now it’s Adlisa’s turn to serve, selected from seven candidates to step into the opulent luxury of her new life. Her survival depends on maintaining a fragile illusion, standing in for the child Her Ladyship lost centuries before.
Yet Adlisa is no helpless daughter, here to serve and earn coin for her family until her untimely death. She plays her own games with the Lord and Lady of the house, and she is not as helpless as she seems.
This chapbook presents a stand-alone story set in the world of A.G. Slatter’s The Crimson Road, alongside an author’s note and an updated chronology of the Sourdough universe.
Angela “A.G.” Slatter is the author of the gothic fantasy novels All the Murmuring Bones, The Path of Thorns, The Briar Book of the Dead and The Crimson Road (Titan Books), and the supernatural crime novels Vigil, Corpselight and Restoration (Jo Fletcher Books). She’s also written twelve short story collections, including The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, The Wrong Girl & Other Warnings and A Feast of Sorrows: Stories, and the novellas, Of Sorrow and Such, Ripper and The Bone Lantern.
Vigil was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award in 2018, and Angela has won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Shirley Jackson Award, an Ignotus Award (Spain), a Ditmar, two Australian Shadows Award and eight Aurealis Awards. All the Murmuring Bones was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards’ Book of the Year and the Shirley Jackson Award. Angela’s short stories have appeared in Australian, UK and US Best Of anthologies. Her work has been translated into Bulgarian, Dutch, Chinese, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Polish, Hungarian, Turkish, French and Romanian. Film rights have been optioned for her novelette “Finnegan’s Field”, and her novels Vigil and The Path of Thorns.
She has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, is a graduate of Clarion South 2009 and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop 2006, and in 2013 she was awarded one of the inaugural Queensland Writers Fellowships. In 2016 Angela was the Established Writer-in-Residence at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre in Perth. She has been awarded career development funding by Arts Queensland, the Copyright Agency and Creative Australia.
Find her online at www.angelaslatter.com