Today’s the publication day for The Chatelaine, my weird fantasy novel set in Bruges in the 14th century. There are many things I love about this novel: the spiteful, middle-aged woman at its heart, her companions (her head-in-the-clouds daughter, a sharp-tongued mercenary, a widowed and bereaved miller’s wife, a bourgeois townswoman). There’s a beast who lives in a canal, and strange creatures forged in a beast that people call “Hell” even though it’s not really. And Hell is captained by a woman whose name no one knows, a figure called The Chatelaine.

Do heed the content note on this one. It’s the darkest of my books so far. It’s available now in ebook and audio everywhere, and print in some countries, including the UK. The North American print version is coming Sept. 5.

This is a reissue of a book that’s been out of print for a few years. (More on that backstory in a moment, for the interested.) I’m so grateful to HarperVoyager and my editor Jane Johnson for helping me bring this book back into the world. And to Beth Eyre for brilliantly narrating the audiobook — the first time this book has appeared in audio form. And to Andrew Davis for the cover art, and the whole production team for copyediting, proofreading and design.

I keep a folder in my email called Ideas, for sending a quick note to every time something strikes me (the equivalent of a notebook and a pencil in the pocket.)

On August 5, 2013, I emailed myself with the subject line “story idea: raid on hell” with nothing in the body except a link to the Wikipedia article about Dulle Griet, the subect of a painting by Pieter Bruegel. I do remember the rabbit hole that led me to that idea that day. I was working on my novel The Humours of Grub Street, and writing a scene that mentioned two cauldrons in a prison. I wanted to nickname the cauldrons after cannons, so I called one Mons Meg. As I searched for a name for the second, I came across the medieval gun in Ghent called Dulle Griet, and the painting from there. I loved the idea of a woman leading a raid on a medieval hellmouth, armed with only pots and pans.

I signed with my agent, Jennie Goloboy, one year later, with The Humours of Grub Street. By then I was already working on the hellraider novel, which eventually I titled Armed in Her Fashion. To make a long story short, we sold both Humours and Armed to ChiZine, an independent Canadian publisher. They wanted to bring out Armed first, even though I’d written it second, which was fine by me. They gave it a lovely cover by Erik Mohr and S.M. Beiko edited it — she was one of the first people to fall in love with this unusual book and see its potential.

In 2018, the book came out, and it garnered some lovely reviews, including this one at Tor and a starred review at Publishers Weekly. To my astonishment, it was also shortlisted for the Crawford award, the Locus award for best first novel, and the Sunburst award. It was also shortlisted for the Aurora award, Canada’s fan-voted speculative fiction award — and it won. That’s the only award I’ve ever won for my fiction, and it was a wonderful moment, especially as the ceremony happened in Ottawa, where I live.

Shortly after that, some problems with ChiZine came to light, and I asked for (and received) the rights back to Armed in Her Fashion, and to The Humours of Grub Street. (This is why The Humours of Grub Street has never been published. Maybe one of these days. Now that it’s been more than a decade since I wrote it and I have evolved as a writer since, I feel I would want to revise it a fair bit, but I do love it still.)

Five years after it was first published, and almost exactly 10 years after I emailed myself with the first seed of the idea, the book now called The Chatelaine is back out in the world, through HarperVoyager. I resisted rewriting it completely (see above about books that one wrote a decade ago) but I took the opportunity to lightly revise it (with the help of Jane Johnson). We also added a prologue, which had been published as a short story in the wonderful anthology Trouble the Waters: Tales of the Deep Blue. We moved a chapter to a different position. And I took the chance to change one thing I had long wished I could: several of the characters had misgendered the mercenary character, who’s what we would call today a trans man. That was unnecessarily hurtful to readers, so I took the opportunity to greatly reduce that.

This book is very special to me and it’s been gratifying to see it find its readers.