Novella Express 3

Novella Express is a book series celebrating the full diversity and energy of literature's most precious form ― the novella.

Edition #3 of Novella Express with: Bluebird by Sonia Hadj Said; Dear FIN by Andrea Layne Black; Between the Virgin and the Sea by Cath Barton.

Bluebird starts on a morning that the protagonist believes to be the end of her life. An immigrant from Eastern Europe, the narrator has spent the last ten years thriving to be a writer or a journalist in London and failing on every front. In a bid to try and save herself, she takes a month off from her catering job and takes us down memory lane of experiences of being a young immigrant woman as well as a struggling artist. Minimum-wage jobs, unpaid internships, school certificates, rented rooms in dangerous-feeling areas, nightlife, rejections, family expectations: these are all entwined in her inner monologue as she fights for her own life before time runs out.

Andrea Layne Black's LGBQT novella Dear FIN tells the story of Jack Wilson, a young man mourning his beloved dog, on the eve of his 17th birthday and the six-year anniversary of the tragic death of his parents, as he struggles with friends, family, sexuality, and his troubled feelings in the small coastal community of River City.

Cath Barton's melancholic novella Between the Virgin and the Sea is set in an unnamed city which has fallen off the map of the world, accessible now only by sea. Violence has broken out in the city and the people, fearing that the established church is involved, pray instead at roadside shrines. The story tells the events of a day at the end of which the white statue of the Virgin which stands on a hill overlooking the city may - or may not - come to life to restore peace to its people. Central to the story is a boy called Tag, the things of which he dreams and the maps he draws.