Excerpt from The Age of Calamities by Senaa Ahmad, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The cooks are baking down in the kitchen. The yeasty comfort of this aroma, which reminds her of the seam of volcanic heat that escapes when she cracks a fresh loaf, of a day opening beneath her, is too much. She shuts her nostrils. Her silk nightgown flaps at her ankles. When she can, she reaches out and touches the walls, the radiators, the edges of doorframes. Reminding herself that she is here, now, she is alive, that this dream is all too real. She can't falter yet. There's work to do.

A gibbet stands in the courtyard beneath a lonesome moon. They thread the noose around her neck with genteel care, snugly, even though the youngest one quakes every time his skin makes contact with hers. Up in the turret window, she sees Henry watching at a distance, as he does best. A coward in his big-boy breeches.

It is a quick death. The noose is tight. The drop is long. No one's trying to be cruel here. One person cries out but is quickly silenced. The wardens double-check, triple-check to make sure she's properly dead this time. From the courtyard to the turret, they flash a thumbs-up to Henry. He lets the curtain fall. This time, he does not visit her tenderly. It is done.

The wardens will return to their card games, all except the youngest one, who mourns her without meaning to. He will simmer with sorrow for hours until, without warning to himself or others, he punches a wall so hard he fractures most of the knuckles in his right hand, leaving a fist-sized whorl of buckled plaster as a signature.

And when she wakes up, hours later, on a slab of wintry marble in the royal morgue, it's with a broken neck and very little air in her lungs. She adjusts her neck the way she might correct a crooked hat—difficult without a proper mirror, but she manages. She tightens the belt on her flimsy nightgown and slips through the haunted halls, pausing only when she reaches the king's chambers. She doesn't knock. She doesn't crow or look for consolation, although the pang is there, and it feels unstoppable. Instead, with great effort, she continues on to her apartments, where she goes right back to bed. She is wiped, and the throb in her neck is telling her to conserve strength. But most of all, it is such a trivial insult to him, so small, so vicious, to fall asleep as soundly as she does this night.

* * *

FOR A TIME, it's quiet. Henry stalls. He consults his advisers, who are just as baffled. He tries to get his head around the situation, but at least he has the grace to do it far from her.

You'll want to hear that Anne takes solace in these precarious days, so let's say that's true: she takes that trip she always meant to, an ethereal island resort where every day the indigo waters whisper, Get out, get out while you still can, and the jacarandas whistle a jaunty tune of existential dread. She cashes in her many retirement portfolios, she doesn't so much throw parties as fling them, handfuls of bacchanalia into those feverishly starlit nights.

Or: she digs her heels deep into the Turkish carpets of her palatial apartments and doesn't budge. In the bruised hours between dusk and midnight, she feels a joy so grandiose that it fills the empty canals and sidewalks within her. She takes to promenades around the gardens, drinking in the virtuous geraniums in their neat rows and the slightly ferocious hedge maze with its blooming thistles and uncertain corners. She grows sentimental about centipedes and spiders and wasps and belladonna and ragwort and nettles and every other hardscrabble weed, every pernicious pest. I'm still here, she says to the wasps, the centipedes, the belladonna, the ragwort. I'm still here.

The joy of the narrow escape is that it unfurls into hours, hidden doors that lead to secret passages of days, even if those days are few, even if she knows it. None of it is hers and it's all she's got. She loses herself, like a woman in a myth, untethered in time, unraveling with possibility.

Excerpted from The Age of Calamities by Senaa Ahmad. Copyright © 2026 by Senaa Ahmad. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.