CATRIONA WARD DISCUSSES HER NOVEL THE GIRL FROM RAWBLOOD WITH MIKE MIGNOLA AND DEVIN GRIFFITHS

The Girl from Rawblood (Sourcebooks Landmark)

For generations the Villarcas have died mysteriously, and young. Now Iris and her father will finally understand why...

At the turn of England's century, as the wind whistles in the lonely halls of Rawblood, young Iris Villarca is the last of her family's line. They are haunted, through the generations, by "her," a curse passed down through ancient blood that marks each Villarca for certain heartbreak, and death.

Iris forsakes her promise to her father, to remain alone, safe from the world. She dares to fall in love, and the consequences of her choice are immediate and terrifying. As the world falls apart around her, she must take a final journey back to Rawblood where it all began and where it must all end...

From the sun dappled hills of Italy to the biting chill of Victorian dissection halls, The Girl from Rawblood is a lyrical and haunting historical novel of darkness, love, and the ghosts of the past.

Praise for The Girl From Rawblood

“Wade perfectly balances sensory richness with the chills of the uncanny.” — Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“[an] atmospheric debut.”  — Booklist 

“Brilliant – The Girl From Rawblood is the old-school gothic novel I have been waiting for. While it delivers everything I want from a ‘haunted house/family curse’ story, it is still stunningly original. I have never read anything like it and that’s saying something.” — Mike Mignola, creator of the Hellboy comic book series

“Ward’s layered and skillfully crafted novel weaves elements of classic gothic and horror into a remarkable story populated by unforgettable characters, palpable atmosphere, and rich lyricism. Imagine the darkest and goriest undertones of Edgar Allan Poe, the Brontës, Charles Dickens, and Shirley ­Jackson, and you’ll have an idea of what Ward offers here.”  — Library Journal, Starred Review  

“Elegiac in its prose and haunting in its imagery, The Girl from Rawblood is a precisely and beautifully woven tapestry through which threads of darkness wind their inevitable way. Ward has crafted a sweeping saga of madness in all its forms that will chill you to the bones and draw you into its murky depths.” — Charlie Lovett, New York Times bestselling author of The Bookman’s Tale and First Impressions   

“A story to satisfy the most gothic of hearts. I was hooked on the very first page and The Girl from Rawblood never let me go. Sentence by sentence, Catriona Ward made herself one of my very favorite writers.” — Kelly Link, 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Get in Trouble

Catriona Ward was born in Washington DC and grew up in the US, Kenya, Madagascar, Yemen and Morocco. She studied English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford followed by the UEA Masters in Creative Writing. After living in New York for 4 years where she trained as an actor, she now works for a human rights foundation and lives in London.

Mike Mignola is best known as the multiple award-winning creator, writer, and artist of B.P.R.D. and Hellboy, but has fostered several other projects like The Amazing Screw-On Head and Baltimore with Christopher Golden. Although he began working as a professional cartoonist in the early 1980s, drawing 'a little bit of everything for just about everybody' - including characters like Batman and Wolverine - he was also a production designer on the Disney film Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Mignola also acted as a visual consultant to Guillermo del Toro on Blade 2 and the film versions of Hellboy, which were broadly adapted by del Toro from the original comic series. Mike Mignola currently lives in southern California with his wife, daughter, and cat.

Devin Griffiths, a former biologist who studied artificial evolution, is an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern California. His work has been featured in ELH, Studies in English Literature, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Literature Compass, and Book History. He is the author of The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwin’s and The Radical Catalogue.