Other Words for Smoke

Voted Teen & YA Book of the Year at the 2019 Irish Book Awards. From the award-winning author of Spare and Found Parts comes a story of a haunted house, magic behind the wallpaper, and the strangest summer ever. The house at the end of the lane burned down, and Rita Frost and her teenage ward, Bevan, were never seen again. The townspeople never learned what happened. Only Mae and her brother Rossa know the truth; they spent two summers with Rita and Bevan, two of the strangest summers of their lives... Because nothing in that house was as it seemed: a cat who was more than a cat, and a dark power called Sweet James that lurked behind the wallpaper, enthralling Bevan with whispers of neon magic and escape. And in the summer heat, Mae became equally as enthralled with Bevan. Desperately in the grips of first love, she'd give the other girl anything. A dangerous offer when all that Sweet James desired was a taste of new flesh...

Sarah Maria Griffin's first novel, Spare and Found Parts, was published by Titan Books in Spring 2018 and was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards that year. Her second, Other Words For Smoke, arrived in April 2019. Her collection of essays about emigration, Not Lost, was published by New Island Press in 2013. Her nonfiction has appeared in Winter Papers, Guts, The Stinging Fly and The Irish Times and more recently, in a weekly series about the internet for The Gloss Magazine. She was the recipient of an Arts Council Bursary for Literature in 2017 and 2018, and is a winner of the European Science Fiction Chrysalis Award. She was the Writer in Residence in Maynooth University in 2017/18, the DLR Writer In Residence in 2018/19. She tweets @griffski.