Arcadia Books

A normal camping trip: Once every year, Scoutmaster Tim Riggs leads a troop of boys into the Canadian wilderness for a weekend camping trip, a tradition as comforting and reliable as a good ghost story around a roaring bonfire. The boys are all friends, and the weekend should go smoothly. A horrifying visitor: It comes to them in the night. An unexpected intruder, stumbling upon their campsite like a wild animal. He is shockingly thin, disturbingly pale, and voraciously hungry. And whatever has made him sick . . . is contagious. A struggle to the death: And so it begins. An agonizing weekend in the wilderness. A harrowing struggle for survival. No possible escape from the elements, the infected . . . or one another. The incredible novel of friendship, horror, wilderness and survival by a modern master.

"Do love stories often end this way?" "Why do you think it's over?" Shesheshen has made a fatal mistake for a monster: she's fallen in love. Shesheshen is a shapeshifter - one who is perfectly content to stay as an amorphous lump in her swamp unless impolite monster hunters invade intent on murdering her. Then, she meets warm-hearted Homily, who mistakes Shesheshen for a human like her. But just as Shesheshen is about to confess her true identity, Homily reveals she's hunting the shapeshifting monster that supposedly cursed her family. Shesheshen didn't curse anyone, but to give them both a chance at happiness, she must figure out why Homily's family thinks she did - while surviving her toxic in-laws long enough to build a life with the woman she loves. A glorious, funny, occasionally slightly violent love story which asks us to examine - and re-examine - the meaning of legacy, family and love.

In Bratislava, Teddy Pedersen, a middle-aged, Danish university lecturer, receives a visit from an Eastern European woman who turns out to be his half-sister. Father to both of them was a Danish SS officer who had officially been declared dead in 1952, but had in fact lived on in Yugoslavia for many years. In Copenhagen, Teddy's older sister is arrested on suspicion of being a Stasi agent, and a murder leads Teddy - and the Danish intelligence service - to investigate the relationship between these two - the woman in Denmark and the woman in Bratislava. The link between them proves to have far-reaching personal and political consequences.