Novella Express #3

Edition #3 of Novella Express

A New Dawn for the Novella

featuring:

• Bluebird by Sonia Hadj Said

• Between the Virgin and the Sea by Cath Barton

• Dear FIN by Andrea Layne Black

Novella Express is a book series publishing novellas submitted from around the world.

CONTRIBUTING TO EDITION #3:

Bluebird starts on a morning that the protagonist believes to be the end of her life.

An immigrant from Eastern Europe, the narrator has spent the last ten years thriving to be a writer or a journalist in London and failing on every front.

In a bid to try and save herself, she takes a month off from her catering job and takes us down memory lane of experiences of being a young immigrant woman as well as a struggling artist. Minimum-wage jobs, unpaid internships, school certificates, rented rooms in dangerous-feeling areas, nightlife, rejections, family expectations: these are all entwined in her inner monologue as she fights for her own life before time runs out.

Without sentimentality, Sonia Hadj Said's captivating novella records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness as an immigrant woman attempts to reconcile herself to the world around her.

Cath Barton's melancholic novella Between The Virgin and the Sea is set in an unnamed city which has fallen off the map of the world, and is accessible now only by sea.

Violence has broken out in the city and the people, fearing that the church is involved, pray instead at roadside shrines.

The story tells the events of a day at the end of which the white statue of the Virgin which stands on a hill overlooking the city may ― or may not ― come to life to restore peace to its people. Central to the story and living in the barrios is a boy called Tag, the things of which he dreams and the maps he draws.