Verve bags Feldman's 'unsettling, urgent' cli-fi

Independent publisher Verve Books has snapped up Saturnalia, a novel exploring climate change in near-future Philadelphia, by Stephanie Feldman.

Editor Jenna Gordon has acquired UK & Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) from Rachel Clements at Abner Stein on behalf of Stacia Decker at Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.

"In her whirlwind new novel, Feldman explores climate collapse and class warfare, trauma and rebirth through a feminist blend of suspense, cli-fi and magical realism," the synopsis reads. "The action unfolds in a near-future Philadelphia, across a single night, from the perspective of a young tarot reader as she attends a solstice masquerade party where the elitist hosts have sinister motives. An uncanny marriage of Mariana Enriquez, Daisy Johnson and Jeff VanderMeer, Saturnalia is a darkly imagined, disturbingly relatable novel for contemporary readers."

The book was recently selected as One to Watch in 2023 by the Evening Standard, and Best Fantasy novel of 2022 by Vulture in the US. 

Gordon said: "The Verve team are so excited to be bringing Saturnalia to UK readers. It’s an unsettling and urgent novel that draws on timely anxieties about the future and speaks to a moment when we’re seeing people, particularly younger generations, turning to magic, fantasy and the supernatural as a means of escaping an increasingly unstable reality."

Feldman is the author of the debut novel The Angel of Losses (Ecco Press) which won the Crawford Fantasy Award and was a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award. She is co-editor of the multi-genre anthology Who Will Speak for America? Her stories and essays have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Catapult Magazine and Electric Literature, among others. 

Feldman comments: "This book is set in my hometown, but it’s about an urgent global question: how can we create a future during what feels like a slow apocalypse? I’m thrilled that Verve is bringing the Saturnalia carnival to UK readers."

Verve Books will publish in paperback original in October 2023, with an e-book edition available earlier in the year. Ulverscroft will publish an audio edition simultaneously with Verve’s print edition.