No Love Lost

Introduced by Patricia Lockwood: Gothic tales from the mistress of the weird behind frogman-romance Mrs Caliban for fans of Shirley Jackson, Lucia Berlin and Patricia Highsmith.

'Wonderful.' Margaret Atwood
'Genius.' Patricia Lockwood
'Remarkable.' Joseph Heller
'Perfect.' Max Porter
''Immensely skillful'. Ursula K. Le Guin
'Tender, erotic, singular.' Carmen Maria Machado
'Still outpaces, out-weirds, and out-romances anything today.' Marlon James
'One of the greatest short story writers we have.' The Times
'You are in masterly hands as Ingalls lures you into a swamp of violence and magic.' Sunday Times

After a one-night-stand with the Angel Gabriel, a monk is transformed into a pregnant woman.
Lost in the fog, two visitors are lured into a ruined candlelit mansion.
A wife confiscates her husband's homemade sex doll, only to demand her own.
Great-aunts warn of the deadly skin of the pearlkillers.
Rachel Ingalls' incomparable novellas are masterpieces: surrealist, subversive, tragicomic. Prepare to meet what lurks beneath .

'Macabre, fantastic and haunting . . . One of the most brilliant practitioners of American Gothic since Poe . . . Read her at your peril.' Independent

'Fables whose unadorned sentences belie their irreducible strangeness . . . In her vision of intimacy and interdependence, you're simply not safe until everybody else is dead . . . Brilliant.' New Yorker

'Resists definition . . . Her work combines subtlety and horror, magic and stark realism, Greek tragedy and happily-ever-afters . . . Rare and fine. ' Guardian

'Idiosyncratic, haunting, masterly . . . A modern fabulist making myths which explode into strangeness.' Observer

Rachel Ingalls was born in Boston in 1940. She dropped out of school and spent time in Germany before studying at Radcliffe College, then moved to Britain in 1965 where she lived until her death. Her debut novel, Theft (1970), won the Authors' Club First Novel Award. Mrs Caliban (1982) was named - to her surprise - one of the 20 best American novels since WWII by the British Book Marketing Council (alongside Toni Morrison, Philip Roth and John Updike) and Faber's new edition was celebrated by fans such as Marlon James, Patricia Lockwood, Max Porter, Carmen Maria Machado and Sarah Hall. Over half a century, Ingalls wrote 11 story collections and novellas to great acclaim but is still relatively unknown, one of many women writers described as 'famous for not being famous'. She died in 2019 after a revival of interest in her unforgettable fiction.

Patricia Lockwood is the author of four books, including the 2021 novel No One Is Talking About This, an international bestseller, finalist for the Booker Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction, and translated into 20 languages. Her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and was named one of the Guardian's 100 best books of the 21st century. She is also the author of two poetry collections, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (2014) and Balloon Pop Outlaw Black (2012). Lockwood's work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor. She lives in Savannah, Georgia.