THE PICNIC (pre-order)
THE PICNIC (pre-order)
“If you rub your fingertips together, or your palms, you’ll produce a slough of dead skin, black with pollutants even if you think your hands are clean. If you do it for long enough the skin remaining takes on a lighter hue, like an infant’s. There’s a similar lightness in the soul when you leave the city, but you have to work for it by debriding the grime that adheres to the workaday self — which is why we go on weekend picnics.”
This is a pre-order; customers will receive their books when The Picnic is published, in March 2027.
All pre-orders will be signed by the author, and come with a special limited edition bookmark and three postcards.
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The Picnic – the long-awaited return to avant-garde fiction by the bestselling, prize-winning author Alex Pheby – tells two parallel stories about picnics.
The first is the tale of a picnic gone wrong.
Taking place in France – reimagining Maupassant’s famous short story ‘Partie de Campagne’ as well as the celebrated 1936 Renoir film it inspired – it relates a Parisian family’s fractious and sexually charged day out in the countryside.
The second is the story of a picnic gone very wrong.
Taking place in England, in another time (a time more-or-less like our own), with characters who might or might not be real (and might or might not be connected to the first) – and unfolding as a parable of innocence versus age – this outing heads towards a horrible and unexpected horror that, once read, is impossible to forget.
Individually, each of these stories are exquisite. Combined, they create something even greater than the sum of their parts – and a novel of extraordinary, relentless power.
ALEX PHEBY lives in Scotland, and teaches at the University of Newcastle. Alex’s second novel, Playthings, was shortlisted for the 2016 Wellcome Book
Prize. His third novel, Lucia, won the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize. His fantasy trilogy, the Cities of the Weft – comprised of Mordew, Malarkoi, and
Waterblack, has been called “the future of fantasy” by Marlon James.