Notes from a Regicide
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly and Amazon!
A Finalist for the Octavia E. Butler Award!
“Few capture the grubbiness of intimacy — and the starchy scent of home — as well as Fellman does in his depiction of his characters’ trans family. Magnificent, heartbreaking.” —Charlie Jane Anders for The Washington Post
“An all-too-timely tale of trans rights and loss.” —People Magazine
Notes from a Regicide is a heartbreaking science-fiction story of trans self-discovery from award-winning author Isaac Fellman.
When your parents die, you find out who they really were.
Griffon Keming’s second parents saved him from his abusive family. They taught him how to be trans, paid for his transition, and tried to love him as best they could. But Griffon’s new parents had troubles of their own – both were deeply scarred by the lives they lived before Griffon, the struggles they faced to become themselves, and the failed revolution that drove them from their homeland. When they died, they left an unfillable hole in his heart.
Griffon’s best clue to his parents’ lives is in his father’s journal, written from a jail cell while he awaited execution. Stained with blood, grief, and tears, these pages struggle to contain the love story of two artists on fire. With the journal in hand, Griffon hopes to pin down his relationship to these wonderful and strange people for whom time always seemed to be running out.
In Notes from a Regicide, a trans family saga set in a far-off, familiar future, Isaac Fellman goes beyond the concept of found family to examine how deeply we can be healed and hurt by those we choose to love.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fellman (The Two Doctors Gorski) paints an intimate and vivid portrait of a queer family weathering a dystopian world in this triumphant sci-fi novel. Some thousand years in the future, New York City journalist Griffon Keming mourns his late adoptive parents, Zaffre and Etoine, who took him in when he was a closeted 15-year-old escaping abuse. After he unearths a memoir that Etoine left behind, "Autoportrait, Blessé" ("Self-Portrait, Injured"), written decades earlier from the jail cell where he waited to be hanged for regicide (a hanging which didn't happen), Griffon attempts to reconcile his recollections of his parents with the life he didn't know they lived before they adopted him. Etoine and Zaffre, both trans, were artists, refugees, and revolutionaries from the city-state of Stephensport, now a dictatorship. Alternating perspectives between Griffon and Etoine, the narrative slowly untangles the history of this found family. Throughout, Fellman explores themes of political dissidence and the power and limitations of art, especially as a means of giving voice to the oppressed. Prescient, emotionally nuanced, and remarkably well told, this offers plenty to sink one's teeth into.