Very happy to announce that my debut novel, ‘The Wounded Me’, is now available for pre-order. It will be published this July by Blackwater Press with a wonderful cover and internal illustrations by Sophie Kromholz.

This story was ignited by Hugo Simberg’s painting The Wounded Angel (1903) and by a central question: why do we follow charismatic leaders?

The story focuses on Peter, its narrator (and the boy looking out of the painting, I’ll write more about this later) and Jamie’s adventure as they leave their feral children village with the purpose to capture a child just like them. Instead, they encounter a winged ‘bird child’ whose mere presence upturns everything they know and have been taught to expect.

Check out the beautiful cover by cover artist and interior illustrator, Sophie Kromholz.

If you love to read atmospheric adventures in the woods, investigate cult-like environments, and get lost in literary stories with a touch of magical realism, this will make an engaging and haunting summer read!

Praise for The Wounded Me:

‘This book is wound tightly, like a body waiting for the blow to land, or to be delivered, and it is a deep, patient exploration of safety—and its opposite. The painting that inspired the novel is a foreboding, fugitive presence in the core story of this book, which is a journey back to a home that contains its own unravelling. A home, that for all the safety it promises, is a place of muted grief and guilt. The love at the heart of this book is careful, complicated and unsettling. This is a concise novel, full of unspoken things that drive acts of storytelling, betrayal and violence and in the end this book is a quiet, knotted, devastatingly timeless tale.’
—Elizabeth Reeder, author of An Archive of Happiness

‘Part fable, part coming-of-age novel, The Wounded Me follows a group of feral boys who have created their own (dys)topia in a forest. Their world begins to change when they encounter a mysterious bird child who becomes a profound reflection on otherness and the myriad ways we respond to it: with love, fear, curiosity, or cruelty. Atmospheric and deeply moving, The Wounded Me is a novel to be savoured and features one of the most unforgettable endings I have ever read.’
—Defne Çizakça, author of Ansuz: Feminist Fairy Tales

‘The Wounded Me is that rare kind of novel that can be luminous and dark at the same time. Reading it is an experience akin to walking in a fairytale forest—not least because much of the novel action takes place in one: enchanting, exciting, tense, and ominous. Magic realism enmeshed with the brutal realities of a community of feral children built on trauma response and necessity creates a modern fable about community, belonging, and closeness, as well as power dynamics, abandonment, dissent, and rebellion. Powerful and unforgettable, The Wounded Me is a superbly crafted novel, a classic in the making.’
—Ioulia Kolovou, author of The Stone Maidens

Pre-order your copy here. It’s a thing of beauty!

P.S: I will be writing more about why I wrote The Wounded Me, why this painting inspired me, why it takes place in a forest, why it is an early analogy to the Venezuelan crisis and diaspora, etc. soon, so stay close to follow more on this haunting story.

• Creative Writing
• The Wounded Me novel