Nightshade - Paperback

by Lynn Hutchinson Lee (Author)

A gorgeous, Gothic, Romany coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the 1980s Southern Ontario tobacco belt--with a dash of magic realism.

Longing for glamour and riches and freedom, Zelda is a young woman who chafes against her Romany identity and her family's poverty. Everything changes when she's lured away from working alongside her mother and aunts and other migrant workers in the tobacco fields and is hired as an assistant and good luck charm to the charismatic Trixie Tormentine.

What starts out as a summer of ease and access to the unfettered wealth of the Tormentines--Trixie's husband Jack owns the tobacco farm that employs Zelda's family and friends--unspools into dangerous displays of power and manipulation. One of the Romany family's puppets, grandmother Puri Dai, acts as Zelda's confidante and mentor, and warns her about the devil of the tobacco fields, a harbinger of destruction.

As Zelda struggles with her simmering feelings toward the Tormentines, the devil appears to her one night in a motel parking lot. Can Puri Dai's love pull Zelda back from the brink and into a new future? The fate of her family depends on it.

Author Biography

Lynn Hutchinson Lee is an award-winning author 'of Anglo-Romany descent on her father's side. Her short fiction was published in Room, Wagtail: The Roma Women's Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere. An excerpt from Nightshade won first prize in the 2022 Joy Kogawa Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2022 Swedish Writers' Festival Prize. In 2023, Nightshade was shortlisted for the Guernica Prize. Her flash fiction won the Editors' Choice Award in Guernica's This Will Only Take a Minute. Her novella Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens is published with Stelliform Press. Lynn writes in Toronto, cooks for friends, feeds birds, and gets lost in her garden.