Incunabulum

The internet’s dead. The phone’s dead. Alice wakes from flu to find the world dead. Or is it?

Choosing a few special photos, she sets off in search of other survivors. Vulnerable Sara, whom she takes under her wing then lets down. The Gaffer, who fills her with disgust. Eric, affable, respectable, trustworthy. Junkie the slut. And Peej, the gaunt underclass anti-hero.

When tension ignites between Alice’s new community and the marauding ‘Bikers’, her refuge is destroyed and Peej is injured. To lie low, they go underground. Literally. But other things need resolving. There’s Alice’s drink habit. The mystery of the tiny face in her photograph. The disrobing of the real villain who damaged Sara. 

And there’s one final battle if they want to survive.


Incunabulum – epic storytelling about aftermath, social and personal rebirth and a woman’s role in it.


Carol McKay’s prize-winning short fiction and poetry have been published widely over the last two decades in anthologies and magazines such as Gutter, Chapman, Mslexia and Wasafiri. She co-wrote Eileen Munro’s bestselling Scottish memoir As I Lay Me Down To Sleep, published by Mainstream in 2008, and was interviewed on BBC World Service about her ground-breaking ebook Second Chances: True Stories of Living With Addison’s Disease in 2013. She won the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2010 and was awarded a place on Magnetic North’s Space/Time residency in 2018. Her story In UK Now reached the finals of the Dinesh Allirajah Prize for Short Fiction, run by Comma Press, in 2019.  Carol taught and mentored in creative writing through The Open University from 2004 till 2018. Incunabulum is her first novel. 



Praise for Carol McKay’s writing

‘hallucinatory urban realism’ – Suhayl Saadi 

‘tense and dramatic’ – Jane Rogers 

‘uncompromising … unsentimental’ – Willy Maley 

‘warm but clear eyed’ – The Metro


Praise for Ordinary Domestic: Collected Short Stories

‘The author talks in the voices of the marginalized, the robbed, beaten and raped, the dispossessed. That she finds humanity not just in them but also in their persecutors is a measure of the power of her quiet, lethal understatement.’

David Manderson, author of Lost Bodies, Kennedy & Boyd, 2011, and The Antihero’s Journey, Peter Lang, 2021.


‘Carol McKay’s skill is in the compassion she conveys for her characters regardless of their flaws or the chaos of their lives. … She writes about the awkward topics (disability, adoption, incest, sexual violence) with such deceptive ease that it is our own discomfort and prejudices that we bump up against, not those of the author.’ 

Alison Napier, Northwords Now issue 21, Summer 2012.