Tatterdemalion

Description

In a ruined world, what survives are the tales we tell. Tatterdemalion is a uniquely original post-apocalyptic novel rooted in fantasy and folklore. It begins when Poppy, who speaks the languages of wild things, travels east to the mountains with the wheeled and elephantine beast, Lyoobov. He's seeking answers to the mysteries of his birth, and the origins of a fallen world. Up in the glacial peaks, among a strange, mountainous people, a Juniper Tree takes Poppy deep into her roots and shows him the true stories of the people who made his world, people he thought were only myths. Their tales span centuries, from three hundred years in the future all the way back to our present day. It is through this feral but redemptive folklore that Poppy begins to understand the story of his own past and his place in the present. Tatterdemalion is a brilliant collaboration between the visual artist Rima Staines and the author Sylvia Linsteadt, and it features 14 original colour illustrations which inspired the story.

Sylvia Victor Linsteadt is a writer, artist and certified animal tracker. Her short fiction has been published in New California Writing, Dark Mountain, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Golden Key and Deathless Press. Her collection of stories, The Gray Fox Epistles, won the James D. Phelan Literary Award from the San Francisco Foundation in Fall 2014. Her published books include The Wonderments of the East Bay (Heyday, 2014), and The Lost Worlds of the Bay Area (Heyday, forthcoming 2017). From 2013 through early 2016, she ran a stories-in-the-mail business called Wild Talewort, in which she sent re-wilded myths and folktales rooted in the landscapes of California to the physical post-boxes of hundreds of subscribers around the world. Artist Rima Staines uses paint, wood, word, music, animation, clock-making, puppetry and story to attempt to build a gate through the hedge between the worlds. Her paintings have been exhibited at shows from Scotland to France. Her artwork has appeared on book covers such as Catherynne M. Valente's Ventriloquism and in magazines such as Earthlines, Scheherezade's Bequest, The Land, Plant Healer, Taproot, Marvels & Tales, Illustration and Tiny Pencil. Her book illustrations include The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre by Jack Zipes, Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales by Sibelan Forrester et al., and Dark Mountain Volumes 2, 3 & 4

"Exquisite: Angela Carter gone feral with Ursula Le Guin. It is like a folk tale, but seen in its tattered shreds, glimpsed, but then utterly realised in language. It makes me glow; it makes my fur rise." -- Jay Griffiths "Lavishly illustrated by Rima Staines, this is a slow tale of a wild girl in a savage and lost land. Haunting and weird . . . we're looking forward to seeing it on our shelves." * Starburst *