My Death

Deeply unnerving and utterly original - the book you will need to talk about. A writer decides to write her next book about a female author and artist unjustly forgotten by history. But what starts as an exciting research project rapidly unravels towards breakdown and horror. The subject is to be Helen Ralston, an early twentieth-century author who has been systematically written out of history. The narrator sets about investigating her story as an artist, writer and muse to a much more famous man. Amazingly Ralston turns out to be still alive, and although elderly and frail a series of interviews begin. But a tale about the historic erasure of female voices starts to break down into something even more sinister, bizarre and all-consuming as the narrator uncovers unnerving parallels between Ralston's story and her own... 'Lisa Tuttle is, quietly and unsensationally, the finest practitioner of unsettling fiction writing today' Neil Gaiman 'My Death deftly navigates between conventional storytelling and the uncanny feeling that things are perhaps other than they appear... In the end, My Death is not about death at all, but about life after catastrophe: how art revives us, and how writers live on in their readers' Lauren Elkin, New York Times