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After Sappho
Published 19 July 2022
ISBN 9781922458612
Format Trade Paperback
Extent 288pp
AU Price $29.99
NZ Price $37.00

After Sappho

Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
19 July 2022
EBook
19 July 2022
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‘After Sappho is superb. Mesmerizing. Such incredible writing. And thinking. Selby Wynn Schwartz tips everyone out of the water.’ Deborah Levy, author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted novels Swimming Home and Hot Milk

What did we want? To begin with, we wanted what half the population had got by just being born.

It’s 1895. Amid laundry and bruises, Rina Pierangeli Faccio gives birth to the child of the man who raped her—the man she has been forced to marry. Unbroken, she determines to change her name and, alongside it, her life.

Now 1902. Romaine Brooks sails for Capri. She has barely enough money for the ferry, nothing for lunch; her paintbrushes are bald and clotted. But she is sure she can sell a painting—and is fervent in her belief that the island is detached from all fates she has previously suffered.

In 1923, Virginia Woolf writes: I want to make life fuller and fuller.

Told in a series of cascading vignettes, featuring a multitude of voices, After Sappho reimagines the lives of a brilliant group of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as they battle for liberation, justice and control over their own lives.

Sarah Bernhardt, Colette, Eileen Gray, Lina Poletti: these are just a few of the women (some famous, others hitherto unsung) sharing the pages of a novel as fierce as it is luminous. Lush and poetic, furious and funny, After Sappho celebrates the women and trailblazers of the past—and offers hope for our present, and our futures.
Published 19 July 2022
ISBN 9781922458612
Format Trade Paperback
Extent 288pp
AU Price $29.99
NZ Price $37.00

About the author

Selby Wynn Schwartz

Selby Wynn Schwartz is the author of The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives, a 2020 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Non-fiction. Her forthcoming novella A Life in Chameleons received the 2021 Reflex Press Novella Award.
portrait photo of Selby Wynn Schwartz

Praise for After Sappho

After Sappho is superb. Mesmerizing. Such incredible writing. And thinking. Selby Wynn Schwartz tips everyone out of the water.

Deborah Levy

This book is splendid: impish, irate, deep, courageous, moving, funny…and truly significant, I think.

Lucy Ellmann

It’s brilliant, an unobtrusive, quietly mesmerising, imagined collocation of linked feminist lives that succeeds in delineating a movement bigger than all of them without diminishing any one of them.

Ian Patterson

A triumph.

Lucy Sussex, Age

Entrancing...Not just a feminist manifesto, After Sappho is also a testimony to the beauty of women – not in a material sense, but rather in celebration of their intelligence, their strength and their endurance to keep fighting for a better future.

Readings

Highly original…[An] entrancing choric collage of a novel which seems to speak both in one voice and in multitudes all at the same time…I loved it.

Claire Allfree, Daily Mail

An ecstatic read…Selby Wynn Schwartz gives us a dark herstory; one that is hysterically funny, poetic and maddeningly tender. It is skin and sinew and breath and longing. And becoming.

Francesca Rendle-Short, Conversation

An absolute marvel.

Stephen Sparks, Literary Hub

Bold...radical...artful...Less fiction than vitally fictionalised fact, this fine novel is an inspiring and witty ode to sisterhood and sapphism.

Literary Review

Enthralling…A gorgeous celebration of pioneering thinkers who rejected docility and self-abnegation in favour of finding their true selves…[A] sparkling, imaginative gem.

Independent

A glorious, genre-expanding work of fiction…Spell-binding.

Telegraph