We’re proud to announce that Ad Hoc Fiction is publishing if there is no shelter, the novella-in-flash by Tracey Slaughter, the well-known poet and prose writer from New Zealand, in October. It’s now available for pre-order from Ad Hoc Fiction today, 17th September. There’s free worldwide shipping for anyone pre-ordering during the weeks until the novella is released on October 30th. The novella will then be for sale on the Ad Hoc Fiction bookshop and soon afterwards on Amazon and in ebook formats.
Tracey’s novella was a runner up in the 2020 Bath Flash Fiction Award, and we agree with the 2020 judge, Michael Loveday, that it is a extraordinary example of the form. We’ve copied his comments from his judge’s report here, which also summarise the story:
“A remarkable story of a woman’s life in an unnamed city in the aftermath of a series of earthquakes. It’s written with claustrophic, relentless and urgent conviction. What’s most compelling is how the story is gleaned mostly through flashbacks, as though, like the city’s buildings, it’s been broken into fragments and we are picking our way through rubble. Gradually, like rescue workers, we uncover the situation of a hospitalized husband, a lover lost to a building’s collapse, and the tender domestic bonds the woman shares with her father and his colleague. Other haunting scenes leap out from the overall portrait of a ruined city – almost like twisted updates on Wordsworthian “spots of time” – a neighbour with a dead bird in a birdcage, a couple glimpsed making love in an office building at night, a street artist daubing impressions of the surrounding wreckage onto canvas. This is a dark, oppressive story but, through it, the writer explores how humanity responds to crisis – and has produced a metaphor for our own times.”
You can also read more about the novella, and what inspired it in Jude’s interview with Tracey
Tracey has had several flash fictions published in our anthologies and we are delighted to be able to publish a longer-form work of hers. if there is no shelter is the third novella-in- flash now open for pre-orders and joins Don’t Tell the Bees by the 2020 runner up Mary-Jane Holmes and Sugar Mountain by Erica Plouffe Lazure. We’ve more coming in the next couple of weeks. A novella Autumn bonanza of winning and commended novellas from the 2020 Bath Flash Fiction Award!
