Book club with us and get 15% off Nightshade until August 31 with the discount code SUMMEROFSTRANGE
Lynn Hutchinson Lee’s novel Nightshade draws you into its magical and haunting orbit with the story of Zelda, a young Romany woman who’s restless in her life and deeply drawn to the idea of something more. When Zelda and her family are hired to work on a tobacco farm in Southern Ontario, Zelda is pulled into the world of the wealthy and magnetic Trixie Tormentine. What begins as a kind of escape from her own humble lifestyle slowly takes on a more unsettling edge of power and manipulation. With her grandmother Puri Dai’s cautions about a devil in the fields, Zelda finds herself questioning what she’s really stepped into.
Buy your own copy here on All Lit Up for 15% off (or find a copy from your local indie using our Shop Local finder).
Read on for our interview with the Publisher Leigh Nash of Assembly Press.
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Interview with Leigh Nash, Assembly Press
All Lit Up: What was it about Lynn Hutchinson Lee’s Nightshade that made you want to publish it?
LEIGH NASH: Nightshade was a slush pile find. In the first paragraph of her cover letter, Lynn Hutchinson Lee noted the lack of representation by Romany writers in the Canadian literary canon, and how in Canada, Romany are an “invisible” population, subject to pernicious or exoticizing myths and stereotypes. That caught my attention—Lynn was able to position Nightshade right away as filling a gap. And then I started reading the actual book and was immediately hooked. I was on a flight, and I remember being so annoyed whenever my reading was interrupted. Which was too bad for my travelling companions!
ALU: How does Nightshade reflect the kinds of books Assembly Press is interested in publishing more broadly?
LEIGH: I think Nightshade is absolutely emblematic of the work we want to put into the world via Assembly: it’s additive to the Canadian literary conversation, the story is grounded but there’s still an element of the unexpected, and the voice is singular. It’s a book that feels both literary and is also a page-turner; we’ve had multiple readers say that they can’t put it down, and that’s the reaction we hope for with every book we publish.
ALU: Can you tell us how the gorgeous cover design by Greg Tabor came together?
LEIGH: When a book title has strong ties to an image, the two choices are to steer into it or away from it. Nightshade the plant plays a large role in the book, and the book has a Gothic bent, so in this case, steering into the image made sense. Greg takes such care in building book covers that reflect the content and mood of each project, and this is one of those instances where he nailed in on the first try. We all fell in love with it!
ALU: What can readers look especially forward to in Nightshade? What is your favourite thing about it?
LEIGH: I think it was a bold choice to start the book in Puri Dai’s voice—she’s one of the puppets who act as strong secondary characters—but it just works. The puppets shouldn’t work, but they do; they add a whole other layer to the narrative that’s rich, surprising, mysterious, and magical. But my favourite thing in the book is Lynn’s facility for description. She’s had a fantastic career as a visual artist, and that’s clearly translated to her writing, as there are some scenes in Nightshade that sent chills down my spine because they were so perfectly rendered. During editing, Lynn shared that she was thinking of paring back one scene in particular because she wondered if it was a little too over the top. I remember shrieking “No, please don’t!” in response. No spoilers, of course, but it was a scene involving swans. In the end, it stayed pretty much intact…and I’m sure you’ll know it when you get to it.
ALU: Did anything about the editorial or publishing process for the book surprise you?
LEIGH: I almost always find the editorial process to be surprising—that’s one of the best parts of the job. Having an author respond to my suggestions with something wildly better than whatever I might have imagined they’d do is so much fun; every draft, every version is like being in a labyrinth where the passages keep shifting, but for the better. Lynn was a total delight to work with—she has such a keen eye and an innate sense of pacing that most of our time was spent polishing what was already there.
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Thanks to Leigh at Assembly Press for answering our questions! Get Nightshade here on All Lit Up for 15% off (discount code SUMMEROFSTRANGE), all summer long.
Keep on top of all summer book club happenings here.
