Mary-Jane Holmes won first prize with Don’t Tell The Bees in our fourth yearly novella-in-flash Award this year, 2020 and we’re excited that you can now pre-order the novella with free world-wide shipping from Ad Hoc Fiction.It’s released for sale on the Ad Hoc Fiction bookshop on 22nd October and will also be available as en ebook on Kindle and Kobo and from Amazon as a paperback too. Read what Mary-Jane said about the story and how she wrote it in our interview with her earlier this year and also 2020 Novella-in-flash judge Michael Loveday’s comments about it. With exquisite writing and an such an evocative and poignant story, we’ll sure you’ll enjoy it. Mary Jane read a piece from the novella at our evening of novella-in-flash readings in June to mark the covid-cancelled Flash Fiction Festival weekend where her book would have been launched. Hopefully. we’ll be able to hear her reading more from it soon.
Quotes from the backcover by former Bath Flash Novella-in-flash Judge, and well-known writer and teacher Meg Pokrass plus an extract from Michael’s report and a further quote by writer Janet Fraser, are reproduced below.

“Holmes conjures the best qualities of both the short story and the novel to create a lyrical evocation of the beauty, pain, and wonder of growing up. “Don’t Tell the Bees” oozes with love and conflict and of a girl’s passage into womanhood. Each chapter is a perfect little stand-alone flash story, a stunning example of what the form can accomplish. The reader is thrust heart-first into the difficult life of No-more and a world of unforgettable characters carved tenderly and precisely. Holmes recreates, in sensory-soaked detail, the world of a small French village near the Second World War. I marvel at how the author blends each stand-alone story into one masterful whole: poignant, compassionate, and profound in emotional impact.

Meg Pokrass, author of The Dog Seated Next to Me , Pelekinsis

“Its absolute originality is expressed in the characters’ eccentric qualities, the richly textured language, the blending of history with fable, and the way that its fragments collectively evoke the whole story of a village and way of life.” Michael Loveday author of flash fiction novella, Three Men On The Edge , V Press.

‘The language is from the gut, newly- forged and freighted’ Jane Fraser, author of The South Westerlies, Salt Publishing.