I’m really pleased to be able to share the news of my next books coming from HarperVoyager UK (and HarperCollins elsewhere). They did such an amazing job with The Embroidered Book, and I can’t wait for the next phase!

First, the summary, and then I’ll talk about the first two books in more detail below.

• The Valkyrie (new novel, coming March 2023 in the UK, July 2023 in North America)
• The Chatelaine (revised edition of my first novel, Armed in Her Fashion, coming May 2023 in the UK, August 2023 in North America)
• I’ve also sold a third book to HarperVoyager UK, called The Sharp Sisters, which is tentatively scheduled for early 2025. (I’m still working on that one. More to come!)

The UK paperback edition of The Embroidered Book is coming in March 2023 (it’ll be available in August in North America) and has a new cover (shown here) in the same style as the covers for The Valkyrie and The Chatelaine (all three are by the very talented Andrew Davis, who also did the original/hardback cover for The Embroidered Book).

Pre-order pages are already up at some retail sites for The Valkyrie and The Chatelaine, and you can add them on Goodreads if you like. Advance reader copies should be available for booksellers and reviewers soon.

THE VALKYRIE

Publisher page here. Content note here. Pre-order page with territory-specific links here.

This book is a queer retelling based (with a great deal of poetic licence) on Germanic and Norse mythology. I think it’s my best work; I think this novel levelled me up as a writer. I love it very much and I hope readers will too. It was edited by the marvelous Jane Johnson.

This is the story of Sigurd/Siegfried, the dragon or lindworm named Fafnir, the queen Gudrun/Kriemhild, and the sorceress/queen/Valkyrie Brynhild.

The source material is, in the main, the Nibelungenlied epic, the Volsunga saga, the Prose and Poetic Eddas and a medieval poem called The Rosegarden of Worms. These are all roughly 12th-14th century in the versions we have.

But the story itself is much older. This is not a story about Vikings, in other words; it’s the historical fiction the Vikings wrote. (Retellings and remixes have been around for a while!)

The story as the Vikings told it (and in my novel too) is set roughly in the 5th century, linked with the historical attack on the city that is now Worms, Germany, in the time of Attila the Hun, and the subsequent migration of the Burgundians. And with Attila’s death, and the changes to the Roman Empire at that time. 

Another thing I found interesting about this story is how it has come down to us in so many different ways. As a child growing up in Canada in the 80s, my first exposure to the remnants was the Broom-Hilda comic strip, and of course, “What’s Opera, Doc?”, based on Wagner’s version of the story.

Even more distant remnants (possibly): some common threads with Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty, and the phrase “it ain’t over until the fat lady sings.”

I don’t know when, in my many re-readings of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, I became aware of the connections between Smaug and Fafnir, between rings of power and the ring of the Nibelungs.

So the story of Brynhild, Sigurd and Gudrun has influenced a great deal of modern fantasy, either on its own or mediated through Tolkien.

It has also been put to political ends, including by Nazis.

Often what hooks me about a retelling is a feeling that things just don’t add up for some characters or perspectives, that the many accretions onto a story (or a bundle of stories) are getting in the way of a different way of seeing it.

So a few years ago, after reading my kid Norse stories at bedtime, I wrote a tiny flash story of my own, my attempt to tell Brynhild’s side of things. 

In some versions, she is identified with a Valkyrie who is cast down to Earth because Odin disagreed with a decision she made. I was interested in her version of that, and of her long sleep on a mountaintop, and especially with her complicated relationship with Gudrun.

It quickly became clear this was not going to stay a flash story. So surprise, it’s a novel! (Though not nearly as long as The Embroidered Book, ha, which weighed in at 185,000 words. The Valkyrie is about 95,000 words.)

THE CHATELAINE

Publisher page here. Content note here.

This is a new edition of my medieval fantasy novel Armed in Her Fashion, which was published in 2018. It got a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly, was shortlisted for the Crawford and Locus awards, and won the Aurora award for best novel.

A month after that award ceremony, some problems with the independent press that published it came to light and I, like some other authors, terminated my relationship with them. So the book went out of print in 2019 and has remained so until now. 

This new edition from HarperVoyager has been revised–I wrote this book in 2013, so I was grateful for the chance to update a few things, as I’ve improved as a writer since then. In particular, there is much less misgendering of the trans character by other characters. I think this is a stronger novel than the original, but the plot remains the same.

It also includes a new prologue about the main character, Margriet, as a child during the Matins of Bruges in 1302. This prologue appeared as a short story called “Lilies and Claws” in the recent anthology Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue from Third Man Books and editors Sheree Renée Thomas, Pan Morigan and Troy L. Wiggins.

If you would like to read a novel that is basically a Hieronymous Bosch painting come to life, The Chatelaine might be the book for you! This one is also about 95,000 words long.