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by Lauren DuPlessis
Nell has curated a perfect museum of the self: a successful career in archaeobotany, a pastel Instagram filled with flowers, and an uncompromising manicure routine.
She's convinced that her veneer of perfection will mask the parts of her she'd rather not think about. When two 'bog bodies' are discovered in elaborate floral graves in a Somerset fen, Nell seizes the opportunity to excavate their secrets. But the deeper she digs into the fertile, waterlogged earth, the more she uncovers memories of her unsettled childhood and strained relationship with her sister… and the more her body manifests her own wildness in ways she can't ignore. Under the pressure of a blazing summer, Nell whirlwinds into toxic romance, intense friendships, and the brutal process of reconciling her past and her future before the weight of it all buries her, too. Blending folkloric horror with explorations of womanhood against a backdrop of eco-anxiety, Tender burrows into the quiet violence of overcoming and accepting our darkest sides.
"An obsessive, oppressive, feverish work of folk-horror tangling and twining into body-horror... Lauren Du Plessis has created a weird and evocative world that you can never quite pull away from, dripping with atmosphere and palpable unease. It's an odd, spiky and compelling read." ―Adam Leslie, author of Lost in the Garden
"A lush, intoxicating debut where secrets are poison and every touch carries the risk of contamination. A story of obsession and transformation, written with the relentless creep of untamed weeds and the bite of a thistle." ―Kirsty Logan, author of Now She Is Witch
This information about Tender was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lauren du Plessis is a British writer of speculative, folkloric, and weird fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Litro and Mslexia among others. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Literature at Oxford Brookes University, and has worked across marketing and narrative writing, mostly for games. She lives in the bluebell-saturated chalk hills of the Chilterns with her family. Tender is her first novel.
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