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HONEYEATER, my subtropical gothic novel, is out now in the USA! (and in Australia on 16 September 2025)

“Lush and atmospheric, this is an elegant cocktail of flood water and gum trees and secrets that refuse to stay safely drowned. Gorgeously written.” —T. Kingfisher, author of A Sorceress Comes to Call

[tanaudel]

HONEYEATER, my subtropical gothic novel, is out now in the USA! (and in Australia on 16 September 2025)

“Lush and atmospheric, this is an elegant cocktail of flood water and gum trees and secrets that refuse to stay safely drowned. Gorgeously written.” —T. Kingfisher, author of A Sorceress Comes to Call

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Jan Brueghel the Elder, Studies of animals (donkeys, cats and monkeys), c. 1616, color on oak wood

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If they could make a girl out of alabaster ornaments, she would be breakable. But this girl is astonishing.

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Honeyeater Review: Something's Rotten in Bellworth

Honeyeater Review: Something’s Rotten in Bellworth

There are certain settings that present a higher difficulty level for authors. Not that it’s easy to write a book even when the setting lends its heft to the narrative, but an old Victorian house looming behind iron gates for a horror story or a glittering high-rise for a locked room mystery certainly do some …

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Out this week (Tuesday) in the USA! Out in two weeks in Australia!

HONEYEATER, a haunted subtropical tale (by me! also @girlfleeshouse), comes out September 2025 and can be preordered now.

PREORDERS are open now from your favourite bookstore or via the publishers: Tor (US), or Picador (Australia), or put in a request with your library!

A richly imagined dark fantasy that pulses with the beautiful destruction of a town reclaimed by the natural world.'An elegant cocktail of floodwater and gum trees and secrets that refuse to stay safely drowned.' - T. Kingfisher, author of Swordheart Subtropical Bellworth is founded on floodplains and root-bound secrets. And Charlie, remarkable only for vanished friends and a successful sister, plans to leave for good, just as soon as he deals with his dead aunt's house. Then Grace arrives, desperate, with roses pressing up through her skin, and drags Charlie into the ghost-choked mysteries of Bellworth, uncovering the impossible consequences of loss and desire - and a choice Charlie made when he was a boy. But peeling back the rumours and lies that cocoon the suburb disturbs more than complacent neighbours and lost souls. And Charlie and Grace are forced to a decision that threatens not only their lives, but all they believed those lives could be...

Also by me: Flyaway (Australian Gothic, won a British Fantasy Award); Travelogues: Vignettes from Trains in Motion; Kindling: Stories (shortlisted for Aurealis, Locus and World Fantasy Awards).

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The September 2025 calendar page is now up on September 2025 Calendar: Queenslander houses and although it isn’t obviously fantastic, it is: I made it because my haunted subtropical novel Honeyeater comes out in September, and takes place mostly in a considerably worse-kept Queenslander.

The art available on Redubble (colour and blue) and InPrnt. 

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What do I want? I'll tell you what I want! I want Ken Railings to walk in here right now, and say 'Pam Shortt's broken both her legs, and I wanna dance with YOU!'

STRICTLY BALLROOM (1992) dir. Baz Luhrmann

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"the book is amazingly, almost relentlessly atmospheric..."

Honeyeater Review: Something's Rotten in Bellworth

Honeyeater Review: Something’s Rotten in Bellworth

There are certain settings that present a higher difficulty level for authors. Not that it’s easy to write a book even when the setting lends its heft to the narrative, but an old Victorian house looming behind iron gates for a horror story or a glittering high-rise for a locked room mystery certainly do some …

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A playlist for HONEYEATER!

HONEYEATER is beginning to appear in the world — and I have created a selected YouTube playlist of Australian songs from my Honeyeater writing soundtrack.

I like to write while listening to a playlist. If the songs becomes familiar enough, they have a Pavlovian effect. Sometimes, in fact, I’ll put on my headphones and start working immediately, having forgotten to press play. But a lightly themed playlist also creates continuity, bridging the big breaks in writing projects when someone else is reading a draft.Out in September — (pre)order now (Tor (US) / Picador (Aus)

I went through my Honeyeater playlist, looking for patterns. Plenty of international artists are on it. But as the soundtrack and book developed, I leaned ever more into Australian songs. Songs that, even if they weren’t from Brisbane specifically, felt true to a particular era of Brisbane living — of sharehouses and finding your feet, and losing your foothold, and All My Friends Are Leaving Brisbane. It’s the point Charlie Wren finds himself getting ready to leave behind, at the beginning of Honeyeater, before things start getting strange.

As a result, the Australian part of the playlist has a distinctly laconic elegiac sound.

(Note: There is a distinct absence of Brisbane punk! I love the faster, harder Brisbane sounds, and listen to it when driving around, and it definitely influenced Honeyeater and me, but it’s far too energetic to write to. I highly recommend seeking it out, though. So much fun. See, e.g., The Chats “6L GTR” (chosen almost entirely for the video).)

I’ve linked the songs separately below, but you can also put on the whole playlist in one go.

From the verandah — leaving and being left and the beauty of the moments of realisation

“Erskineville Nights” (Youth Group)

“London Still” (The Waifs)

“Please Don’t Move to Melbourne” (Ball Park Music)

“Wide Open Road” (The Triffids)

“Bye Bye Pride” (The Go-Betweens, but I also love love the Winterpills cover)

These capture a sense of friendships and vanishing expectations, the pull of a certain era of Australian young (or at least immature) adulthood, when if you didn’t leave for one of the bigger cities, your friends probably would. And maybe you needed to. And maybe you couldn’t. And maybe you sit on the verandah on a jacaranda evenings, not deciding. “Please Don’t Move to Melbourne” only came out this year but it’s so quintessentially that feeling, it retroactively got into the list. Also the music video is all Brisbane.

Australian suburbia — orange-curtained kitchens and hot drinks, siblings and small feelings and large moods, and staying put, but wanting

“Kitchen” (Ruby Fields)

“Stuff and Nonsense” (Missy Higgins covering XXX), with its certainties, if only for the moment.

“Your Love” (Middle Kids)

“Middle of the Hill” (Josh Pyke)

“Don’t Change” (INXS)

“Charlie” (Mallrat)

These songs are for the possibility of present, ordinary affection; getting on comfortably for now; holding to a hard-won moment.

Big emotions — fling your arms out while standing in the rain singing up at the sky sort of songs.

“The Ship Song” (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds — but my favourite version of it to watch is the Sydney Opera House’s Ship Song Project)

“Mistake” (Middle Kids)

“Throw Your Arms Around Me” (Hunters and Collectors)

“Fire and Flood” (Vance Joy)

Sometimes you need to strip off your skin and have big expansive emotions. Incidentally, TripleJ recently had a Hottest 100 of Australian Songs countdown, which had plenty of these, which are excellent for singing with friends on road trips.

Who are you? Who’s in control? — bathroom mirrors and misplaced trust and changing selves

“Mascara” (Killing Heidi)

“Not The Girl You Think You Are” (specifically Holly Throsby covering Crowded House from the album She Will Have Her Way, which is a stunning collection of covers of Neil and Tim Finn songs by Australian and New Zealand singers)

“She Will Have Her Way” (Neil Finn — New Zealand, but still, see above)

Songs that feel like they’re about the negotiability, the unreliability, of who you might be or become.

Streets of your town, if that even exists — places set apart, the promise (if not the delivery of shelter), the impossibility of staying, the impossibility of that place, home

“Streets of Your Town” (The Go-Betweens)

“Brown Snake” (Thelma Plum)

“The Will of the River” (Darren Hanlon)

“Private Universe” (Crowded House — Australian enough for the countdown!)

“There is No Such Place” (Augie March) — I can’t remember which big band they were opening for, but I remember hearing this live for the first time.

Being there, somehow, even while the world moves around you.

Chrysalises — waiting and ready to change, and the risk of losing control and time sliding away

“Biding my Time” (Busby Marou)

“Southern Sun” (Boy & Bear)

“Don’t You Think It’s Time” (Bob Evans)

“Cherub”  and “Stars in My Eyes” (Ball Park Music)

“These Days” (Thelma Plum covering Powderfinger)

And how much change is too much?

Something in the water — daring and sinking and standing firm

“Small Things” (The Audreys)

“Letting Go” (Angie McMahon)

“Oceans” (Adam Newling)

Don’t be scared of the water…

Honeyeater is out on 2 September in the USA and 16 September 2025 in Australia! (But you can preorder it now from good bookstores, or the publishers: Tor (US) / Picador (Aus).

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the thing about a small town is that you gotta have some element of unfathomable wilderness right next to it, an endless unknown that your existence hangs just at the edge of

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In the scullery, there is a faint perfume of new-turned earth.

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paintings of ulysses and the sirens rated by how securely he is tied to the mast

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Faithful reader, even as you comfort yourself that reason must prevail, you dream that you yourself are a girl, a friend to tigers, approaching a magnificent villa.

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Dino Valls, Proscaenia (detail), , 2011.

Oil on wood, 100 x 70 cm.

-Also-

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Childcraft: The How and Why Library, vol. 5, 1976.

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Hey! I’ve followed your blog for a long time, and recent picked up a copy of worlds beyond time— it’s really stunning. I’m so glad to have it to flip through for inspiration for my own art! Thank you 😊

Thanks so much! Glad it can help you out!

Everyone else, check it out: Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s

Big coffee table size, it's got 400+ images, 100+ artists, lots of fun facts and jokes. It's a lot like this blog, but with some more context and history. Here are some nice photos of it from 50 Watts