Queer Author

A wickedly funny and audacious debut novel following a heartbroken academic as she lands in Iraq to lead a United Nation backed deradicalization program created to reform ISIS brides. When Dr. Nadia Amin, a long-suffering academic, publishes and article in the best journal in Criminology on the possibility of rehabilitating ISIS brides she lands a coveted lectureship and is freed from the misery of adjuncting. The United Nations comes calling offering the opportunity to lead a deradicalization program for the ISIS affiliated women in the UN camps. Looking for a way out of London after a painful, unexpected breakup Nadia leaps at the chance. In Iraq Nadia quickly realizes she’s in over her head. Her direct reports are hostile and unenthused to be taking orders from an obvious UN novice, her boss doesn’t provide direction yet demands results and to top things off there’s murmurs the concept of deradicalization is inherently unethical and possibly illegal. Frustrated by her situation and the unrelenting heat, Nadia decided to visit her camp with her sullen team comprised of goody-two-shoes Sherri who never passes up an occasion to remind Nadia of her objections to the program; and Pierre, a snippy Frenchman from a well-connected foreign ministry family who has no qualms blatantly and perpetually scrolling through Grindr. And who could forget Tom, the head of security who is the opposite of the heartbreaker Nadia is doing her best to forget. At the camp, a clumsy introductory with the women who were curious enough to meet with the team is where Nadia meets Sara whose accent gives her away as a fellow East Londoner. From their first interaction Nadia feels inexplicably drawn to the rude girl in the diamante headscarf. She leaves the camp determined to get Sara home. But the system Nadia is trapped in is a quagmire of inaction and corruption. One accomplishment—getting the sign-off to start the program doesn’t guarantee the women will ever be freed from the camp. And so, Nadia makes an impossible decision leading to ramifications she could have never imagined. A triumph of dark humor, FUNDAMENTALLY asks bold questions—who can tell someone what to believe? And how does one save someone who doesn’t want to be saved?

the end of the world was marked with beautiful light we should have known Simmering with protest and boundless love, Jazz Money’s David Unaipon Award-winning collection, how to make a basket, examines the tensions of living in the Australian colony today. By turns scathing, funny and lyrical, Money uses her poetry as an extension of protest against the violence of the colonial state, and as a celebration of Blak and queer love. Deeply personal and fiercely political, these poems attempt to remember, reimagine and re-voice history. Writing in both Wiradjuri and English language, Money explores how places and bodies hold memories, and the ways our ancestors walk with us, speak through us and wait for us.

A literary horror debut about a boy who transforms into a monster, a monster who tries to be a man, and the people who love him in every form he takes Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago’s lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family’s decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses—though curbed by his biological and chosen family’s communal care—threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life. A thought-provoking meditation on grief, acceptance, and the monstrous sides of love and loyalty, Gerardo Sámano Córdova blends bold imagination and evocative prose with deep emotional rigor. Told in four acts that span the globe from Brooklyn to Berlin, Monstrilio offers, with uncanny clarity, a cathartic and precise portrait of being human.