A startling debut noir. A Trail of Blood on the Snow is a chilling exploration of masculinity, madness, and the harrowing legacy of abuse.

"He remembers me. He remembers the screaming and the blood on the snow. He remembers everything, I can tell."

Rex is 41. Halfway to death and no happier for it. Any promise of a better life got stifled decades ago, when Rex was a limping school kid and Max was the school bully.

Then, a chance encounter. Max standing smug and handsome at a gas station with his oh-so-perfect family.

Rex secretly follows them home. Watches them. Thinks about his own miserable life. What Max did to him, and how a real man would claim revenge.

Rex acts.

Is this the making of a monster, or the breaking of a man?

Silently, digitally, a boy takes apart your family

Tom's a regular teenager – sullen, anxious, super-smart, feeling safe within his bedroom and wedded to his screen.

On a packed train, a London commodities trader gets under his skin.

The trader's got a fine wife, two kids, a yappy dog, big house, annual bonus. Tom hacks him. The trader's hardware becomes stuffed with dangerous, damaging images. Call it collateral damage.

Hacking is what Tom does. He's got control of the keyboards of key players in the fossil fuel industry. If he doesn't bring down the grid, who will?

Roads and trainlines lead the main players to a violent confrontation in the brutalist surrounds of London's Barbican Centre. Government agents work to prevent a global blackout. Tom's set to save the planet.

Who will win?

“An imaginative debut” – Sharma Taylor

“Damion Spencer is a voice to look out for” – Irenosen Okojie

A Barbican First debut

The Devil's Horsewhip is a startlingly fine novel-in-stories about Caribbean folklore, superstitions and legends surrounding death by a writer whose prose judges at Wasafiri have described as vivid and with a spectacular voice.

At the pinnacle of the pandemic—a year already punctuated with daily funeral processions—a Jamaican expat gets an envelope covered in red writing from his doctor. It sends him into a mad tumble between bad omen days and fever dream nights until all that he thinks about is that bitter day in the Jamaican White River Valley, where he and other teenagers escaped a double-cutlass-wielding madman out for blood. But death is not one to give up easily. The years are not long enough, neither is fleeing across continents too far for death's spite and all the worse duppies not to come knocking.

Who will cheat death a second time?

A Christian woman who decides to sleep with an obeah man's monkey. The man with the answer to whether Haitian voodoo is stronger than obeah. A woman who knows how to mourn a dead baby. Or the ones who know how to trap a rolling calf, outrun a three-foot horse, and battle a Chinese duppy and win.

If you're superstitious or wary of those who are, come read these sticky tales spun in barbwire.

When it comes to memoir, Miranda Miller is an incorrigible novelist. Viola, three years old in 1953 when guests gather in her parents' London home to watch the Queen's coronation on TV, is not Miranda. Yet character and author share the same age, the same home, the same parents and three brothers, the same friends and fears and love of books and breathless adventures in her native city.

When I Was brings all the family members centre stage, each character opening their consciousness to reveal a multi-faceted study as life presses in on a family's hopes and dreams.

The novel whisks us through 1950s London, in a tale as true as a novelist can make it. The twists of its drama, as a young girl forges her way into being, let you into secrets of resilience and love.

A WRITER'S DREAM ASSIGNMENT TURNS TO NIGHTMARE

Lucy flies from New York to Deìa, an exclusive village on the Spanish island of Mallorca. In his villa, the famous author Manolo awaits. Lucy needs the story of his life for a magazine. But is she willing to become the next wild chapter in his fierce, rampant, deluded life?

Drawing on Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, and tearing at the scars of the Spanish Civil War, this is a novel to thrill your mind and quake your heart.

"A powerful, intense, incredibly frank and uncomfortably erotic portrait of a woman striving to find herself, an intelligent and strong woman who yet has weaknesses that make her vulnerable. The prose is beautiful even when the subject is dangerous." – Crime Time Radio

"A brave and important book that reads like an engrossing thriller." – Grace Nichols, author of Passport to Here and There

"Febrile and frequently disturbing, it had me gripped right to the end." – Mick Jackson, author of The Underground Man

"This is such a powerful, resonant work. If it doesn't reap dozens of literary prizes, then the literary world is as corrupt and supine as I've always believed it to be.” – Morning Star UK