The US paperback of Flyaway is available for pre-order! It comes out on 25 April 2023, but now (that is, 25 to 27 January 2023, USA time) Barnes & Noble is offering get 25% off this edition of Flyaway (AND every other pre-order title) with the code PREORDER25 at checkout.
“Kathleen Jennings’ prose dazzles, and her magic feels real enough that you might even prick your finger on it.”—Kelly Link
“An unforgettable tale, as beautiful as it is thorny.” —The New York Times Book Review
In a small Western Queensland town, a reserved young woman receives a note from one of her vanished brothers—a note that makes her question memories of their disappearance and her father’s departure.
A beguiling story that proves that gothic delights and uncanny family horror can live—and even thrive—under a burning sun, Flyaway introduces readers to Bettina Scott, whose search for the truth throws her into tales of eerie dogs, vanished schools, cursed monsters, and enchanted bottles. Flyaway enchants you with the sly, beautiful darkness of Karen Russell and a world utterly its own.
A British Fantasy Award Winner!
A Ditmar Award Winner!
A 2021 World Fantasy Award Finalist! A 2020 Crawford Award Finalist
An Indie Next Pick!
Named a Best of 2020 Pick for NPR
Transformation, enchantment, and the emotional truths of family history teem in Kathleen Jennings’ stunning debut, Flyaway.
Anika Kls (Artventurin) drew this glowing image for Flyaway as part of her work with the Charting the Australian Fantasticprogram at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf — she showed it to me when we met in Glasgow, and my print of it just arrived.
Over the years, I found drawing to be a vital tool of self-expression. When I go through my collection of drawings, I can see whether I was in a good or bad mood as it will affect my colour palette. However, I also just love the challenge of creating something; of finding inspiration in your surroundings and pursuing your own visions in it. Sometimes I get the weirdest ideas for an art piece when looking at something entirely different, so I try to translate it into my own version.
2. How do you choose a scene to draw?
I am a very visual person. When I read a scene and the images just effortlessly flood into my head, it’s usually a go for me. There has to be something that speaks to me; it’s quite hard to explain. Whenever I have various options, I construct a mental image and ask myself some questions: what would the colour palette be like? How is the scene arranged? Where do I position everything? What are the expressions like? And most importantly, can I pull it off and do it justice?
A little look behind the scene of our poster design by @anika_kls for Kim Wilkins's talk on Australian Fantasy. Make sure to join us next week! 😌 pic.twitter.com/VVmI8esjXv
— Speculative Australia (@SpeculativeAus1) March 18, 2022
I initially attended the Charting the Australian Fantastic course, which is lead by Bettina (Tina) Burger and Lucas Mattila. They offered creative tasks every now and then, which was just perfect. The two tasks I chose allowed me to illustrate one scene from Lion Hearn’s Across the Nightingale Floor and re-draw a Shaun Tan piece in my own style. After handing that in, Tina and Lucas, who were conveniently looking for an assistant, contacted me and asked me if I would like a job (needless to say that I did).
The illustrations I did range from simple character/background sketches, logo designs or fully rendered illustrations for books and short-stories. The wildest ones were probably for Alan Baxter’s The Roo. I am not an expert on kangaroo anatomy and I’m quite sure the FBI is keeping an eye on me now for the endless google searches of gore.
My sketch of Anika and Tina in Glasgow in July
4. Why did you choose to illustrate this scene for Flyaway?
As with every illustration I did for Charting the Australian Fantastic, it was a shared discussion process with Tina and Lucas. We all read the story and needed a very representative image, so we threw some ideas around. It was a trial and error process, but in the end, this scene was the one that had burnt itself into my brain and that worked out well when I did the sketches.
5. What do you hope to do with your art in the future?
That’s a very tough question. Right now, I’m trying to do as much freelance work as possible next to my studies here in Glasgow since prices are skyrocketing. Fan art is always fun to do, but I recently got into DnD and specifically DnD character designs, so I would like to pursue that more in the future.
Depending on what comes after my postgraduate, I might even try to focus solely on illustrations if an opportunity presents itself. The biggest goal is still to design a book cover or do in-book illustrations (Bon Orthwick’s illustrations for Empire of the Vampire blew me away, so there is that goal).
Is it hard? Yes, especially when you’re a perfectionist like me and try to meet expectations.
Do I know what I’m doing? No, but I’m still doing it (trust the process!).
Do you regularly forget to eat and drink while drawing because you’re so caught up in the process and then almost black out? How dare you call me out like that.
Anika Kls illustration for Catching Teller Crow (Ambelin and Ezekiel Kwaymullina) for Charting the Australian Fantastic
I am delighted and honoured to have received Ditmar Awards for best novella (for Flyaway) and for art (for the illustrations for Mother Thorn, by Juliet Marillier). Congratulations to all my fellow nominees J Ashley-Smith, Alan Baxter, Robert Hood, TR Napper, Keeley Van Order and Rovina Cai, and also to the winners and nominees in the other categories.
If you’d like to know more about Flyaway, there are excerpts, links, interviews and reviews on this page: Flyaway.
The Ditmar Awards are open for voting until THIS FRIDAY 19 NOVEMBER 2021 (one minute before midnight Canberra time, which is 10.59pm Brisbane time). Members of any of the last 5 Australian Natcons are able to vote.
It’s a delightful shortlist, and I’m thrilled to have works shortlisted in three categories (links to more information included):
On this observation journal page l was looking at the idea of industrial fabulism.
A few weeks before this, I noted I was interested in the “fabulist-practical and the industrial-fantastic”. This is something that appears in articles in car magazines at mechanics’ offices (often very romantically written) and in some of Diana Wynne Jones’ books, in collections of rural inventions and the science columns in 19th-century periodicals and in Cold Comfort Farm, in Longitude and Apollo 13 and Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange.
It was also a choice I had to actively make in Flyaway, choosing to underline the reliability of beauty by describing aspects of even mechanical detritus as worthy of notice. And it runs throughout Travelogues, much of which involved processing an industrial landscape through the language of enchantment. I touched a little on that in the post All the shape of the land: “a way not only of expressing the experience of made things, but of experiencing the world through them, and finding enchantment in that.”
So on this journal page, I was identifying that particular aesthetic and its appeal. Some points:
It is more of a mode/style/setting than a genre.
It relies on and seeks out beauty in machinery:
It is realism in service of fabulism.
There’s a conscious effort to enchant.
Lyricism is used to deal with industrial objects and surroundings.
It’s an innate aesthetic — not adding a gloss of beauty to the mechanical/industrial, or bolting ornaments on, but seeking it in the objects themselves. The industrial can even be what adds beauty to the fantastic.
It represents a society without a division between the technical/technological and the fantastic.
It is not the same as clockpunk/steampunk/dieselpunk.
There can be overlap, but there is an effort to distinguish itself from the usual genre markers (e.g. going for a blue tint instead of sepia).
It leans on machinery more than the fantastic.
It often avoids the obvious supernatural/fantastic altogether.
Its appeal for me includes:
It is anchored in the real. The enchantment is integrated into reality/realism, OR the fairy-tale is anchored by the industrial element.
As mentioned above, it’s an integrated/innate aesthetic.
It’s designed to be actively attractive.
The cliches and stereotypes of the industrial (especially as opposed to the fantastic) are well established, so I need to consciously choose to use the mode, which can make writing in it a pleasing puzzle. (Swapped descriptions, e.g. light vs tin cans, and switched stereotypes are useful for this.)
BEST NEWCOMER (THE SYDNEY J. BOUNDS AWARD) — Kathleen Jennings, for Flyaway (Tordotcom)
BEST FILM / TELEVISION PRODUCTION — The Boys: What I Know (Season 2, episode 8)
BEST NON-FICTION — Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre, ed. Alison Peirse (Rutgers University Press)
BEST ARTIST — Daniele Serra
BEST COMIC / GRAPHIC NOVEL — DIE Vol. 2: Split the Party, Kieron Gillen & Stephanie Hans (Image Comics)
BEST MAGAZINE / PERIODICAL — Strange Horizons
BEST INDEPENDENT PRESS — Luna Press Publishing
BEST AUDIO — The Magnus Archives, Rusty Quill
BEST ANTHOLOGY — Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora, ed. Zelda Knight & Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki (Aurelia Leo)
BEST SHORT FICTION — Infinite Tea in the Demara Café, Ida Keogh (in “London Centric: Tales of Future London, Newcon Press)
BEST COLLECTION — The Watcher in the Woods, Charlotte Bond (Black Shuck Books)
BEST NOVELLA — Ring Shout, P. Djèlí Clark (Tordotcom)
BEST HORROR NOVEL (THE AUGUST DERLETH AWARD) — Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Jo Fletcher Books)
BEST FANTASY NOVEL (THE ROBERT HOLDSTOCK AWARD) — The Once and Future Witches, Alix E. Harrow (Orbit)
I am thrilled and honoured that Flyaway has been included as a finalist in the World Fantasy Awards for best novella.
My fellow-nominees are
Ring Shout, or Hunting Ku Kluxes in the End Times by P. Djèlí Clark (Tordotcom)
“Stepsister” by Leah Cypess (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2020)
The Four Profound Weaves by R. B. Lemberg (Tachyon Publications)
Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi (Tordotcom)
Here is the full list of Final Ballot and Life Achievement Award Winners for the awards, to be announced this November.
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT Megan Lindholm Howard Waldrop
NOVEL Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury) Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson (Tor Books) The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga Press/Titan UK) Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey US/Jo Fletcher Books UK) The Midnight Bargain by C. L. Polk (Erewhon Books US/Orbit UK)
NOVELLA Ring Shout, or Hunting Ku Kluxes in the End Times by P. Djèlí Clark (Tordotcom) “Stepsister” by Leah Cypess (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2020) Flyaway by Kathleen Jennings (Tordotcom) The Four Profound Weaves by R. B. Lemberg (Tachyon Publications) Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi (Tordotcom)
SHORT FICTION “Glass Bottle Dancer” by Celeste Rita Baker (Lightspeed, April 2020) “The Women Who Sing for Sklep” by Kay Chronister (Thin Places) “The Nine Scents of Sorrow” by Jordan Taylor (Uncanny Magazine, July/Aug. 2020) “My Country Is a Ghost” by Eugenia Triantafyllou (Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2020) “Open House on Haunted Hill” by John Wiswell (Diabolical Plots, June 15 2020)
ANTHOLOGY Edited By, edited by Ellen Datlow (Subterranean Press) The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, Vol. 1, edited by James D. Jenkins and Ryan Cagle (Valancourt Books) Shadows & Tall Trees 8, edited by Michael Kelly (Undertow Publications) The Book of Dragons, edited by Jonathan Strahan (Harper Voyager) The Big Book of Modern Fantasy, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (Vintage Books)
COLLECTION The Best of Jeffrey Ford by Jeffrey Ford (PS Publishing) Velocities: Stories by Kathe Koja (Meerkat Press) Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoka Matsuda, translated by Polly Barton (Soft Skull Press US/Tilted Axis UK) We All Hear Stories in the Dark by Robert Shearman (PS Publishing) Nine Bar Blues: Stories of an Ancient Future by Sheree Renée Thomas (Third Man Books)
ARTIST Rovina Cai Jeffrey Alan Love Reiko Murakami Daniele Serra Charles Vess
SPECIAL AWARD – PROFESSIONAL Clive Bloom, for The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic (Palgrave Macmillan) C. C. Finlay, for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction editing Jo Fletcher, for Jo Fletcher Books Maria Dahvana Headley, for Beowulf: A New Translation (MCD X FSG Originals US/Scribe UK) Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, for The Monster Theory Reader (University of Minnesota Press)
SPECIAL AWARD – NON-PROFESSIONAL Scott H. Andrews, for Beneath Ceaseless Skies: Literary Adventure Fantasy Brian Attebery, for Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts Michael Kelly, for Undertow Publications Arley Sorg and Christie Yant, for Fantasy Magazine Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, for Uncanny Magazine
It is a tremendous honour to be included on the shortlist with seven various and wonderful other titles — and particularly with Angela Slatter‘s gothically fantastic All The Murmuring Bones. I have been working on cover art for the (forthcoming) hardcover of Angela’s novel, and Flyaway wouldn’t have happened without her. So do with that information what you will!
A dazzling gothic fairy tale of rural Australia. The disappearance of Bettina Scott’s family members leads her to uncover truths about her home – the haunting spectacle of small-town psyche expertly sewn throughout the novel. There is a magic rooted in this story that grows more real with every page.
I pinched (with permission!) this photo Jennifer London took of Sam J Miller’s novel The Blade Between in the front of store display in the Union Square Barnes & Noble in New York, because my Flyawayis there too!
Kathleen Jennings 