In the summer of 1972, twenty-one-year-old university undergrad Annette Thornton, aka Thorny Netty, finds herself on a coerced holiday with her younger sister Fiona, expected to spend two long sweltering weeks babysitting said sister on the island of Gran Canaria. To say she’s peeved would be an understatement. But when she catches a glimpse of a stranger on a balcony, impulses long buried begin to surface—impulses that sorely put Thorny Netty’s much-touted self-possession to the test.
From Sappho, with Love is a new series of standalone stories held together by a common theme: a chain of postcards sent from sapphic travellers across space and time.
Once upon a time, a brother and sister were led away into the depths of the forest. It was only to protect them, their mother explained and the brother concurred; yet he insisted on pebbles, bread crumbs. He insisted on looking back for cats and pigeons and whatnots, brightened by the touch of the sun.
Twenty years later, Gretel Kindermann is on her own: her father has taken himself off to Dortmund, her mother is a fixture at the local mental healthcare institution, and her brother Hänsel, oh—
At the heart of the matter, like a thorny-rooted weed, is Frau Heckscher, the purveyor of all things sweet in the little village at the lip of the forest. And now, perhaps, also a niece that no one has heard of before, lately arrived from Vienna to wreak havoc on poor Gretel’s nerves and heart.
In Gretel on Her Own, Elna Holst offers a contemporary sapphic twist to your favourite Germanic fairy tale of homicidal arsonists and houses built out of baked goods, trickster witches, and parenting skills that leave a lot to be desired.
For the space of a breath or two, that wolf had entranced her, mesmerised her, made her believe—the impossible. And that was all it took.
Nothing about this wolf was as it should be.
Pyotra Nikolayevna Kulakova lives in a small Russian settlement in the northern Siberian taiga, where the polar night lasts for a good month out of the year and the temperature rarely reaches above freezing point. Pyotra’s days, too, seem congealed and unchanging, laden with grief, until her baby brother’s close encounter with a tundra wolf upends the lives of the three members of the Kulakov family in one fell swoop.
Pyotra and the Wolf is a queer retelling of Sergei Prokofiev’s symphonic fairy tale, structurally influenced by matryoshka dolls and memory castles. This is a story of darkness and light, love and loss, beast and human. Whichever way the spinning kopek falls.
I thought ease would come, here, tucked away in the safe uneventfulness of Hunsford. It would seem I was mistaken.
In 1813, upon her marriage to Mr Collins, the rector of Hunsford Parsonage, Charlotte Collins née Lucas left her childhood home in Hertfordshire for Kent, where she is set to live out her life as the parson’s wife, in an endless procession of dinners at Rosings Park, household chores, correspondence, and minding her poultry. But Mrs Collins carries with her a secret, a peculiar preference, which is destined to turn all her carefully laid plans on their head.
Lucas is a queer romance, a mock-epistolary novel, and a retelling and continuation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, teeming with Regency references and Sturm und Drang. It is an homage to English literature—and a brazen, revisionist fan fiction. But, first and foremost, it is a love story. Read it as you will.
Stranded on a tropical island, Dr No-Name has no mobile phone, no wallet, no passport, no keys. No left hand, no shoes and no memory. What she does have is a blister pack of nicotine gums, two minibar-sized bottles of whisky (consumed), and what appears to be an endless supply of coconuts. She can't possibly get into any worse trouble, can she?
Loosely based off Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, In the Palm gives a sapphic twist to the stranded-on-a-desert-island trope.
This series of standalone but interlinked seasonal-themed novelettes takes place in Malmö/Lund, Sweden between the years of 1994 and 2000.
In Candlelight Kisses a feminist activist clashes with a blast-from-the-past in the form of one of the contestants in the Malmö Lucia contest.
In Little x a dyslectic bus driver meets with a handsome stranger, the instant attraction leading her to question everything she's taken for granted.
In Wild Bells a sharp, sensational-looking lawyer-to-be gets caught in the spin of wheels that have been set in motion by an unexpected source.
In And Then They Were Four the crew from the previous instalments come together for one final hurrah, as they make their way through Advent 2000.
Elna Holst's short stories have appeared and are forthcoming in a number of anthologies, published by NineStar Press, Cleis Press, SinCyr Publishing, Queer Pack and Bold Strokes Books, among others. Holst has a passion for shorts, ranking these bite-sized delectables among the finest she has to offer. Sensuous, surprising, off-centre and experimental, this collection of sexy trinkets is steadily growing, allowing her to get out and play with fellow authors whenever she's stayed cooped up with novel-writing for too long.
For a full listing of the anthologies Elna's stories have been included in, please visit her author page on Goodreads.
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