Ania Card and Amy Twigg in conversation with Lara Williams

Blackwell’s is delighted to be hosting the Manchester launch of Ania Card’s Above Us The Sea and Amy Twigg’s Spoilt Creatures – two beautifully written, transgressive debuts that are absolutley essential reads this summer. Ania and Amy will be in conversation with Lara Williams.

About the books:

Above Us the Sea – Ania Card

It’s after a night in Cardiff’s loudest gay bar that Toni first lays eyes on Gav, a retired Welsh boxer, and his boyfriend Karol, an aspiring Polish photographer. The trio soon fall into an intimate, ambiguous love triangle.

After a tragic event at a beach in Swansea, the trio are ripped apart, and Toni escapes to London, becoming caught between a convenient, loveless relationship and an illicit, lustful affair.

Lost halfway between the British future she has always wanted, and the Eastern European past she has been running from, Toni can only wonder where and with whom she really belongs.

Above Us The Sea is an ode to the tangled remains of lost loves and the imprints left by grieving souls, yearning for connection. This is a story of aching and emerging, intimacy and distance, set against an increasingly hostile landscape.

Spoilt Creatures – Amy Twigg

They thought they knew everything about us. The kind of women we were.

It was a place for women. A remote farm tucked away in the Kent Downs. A safe space.

When Iris – newly single and living at home with her mother – meets the mysterious and beguiling Hazel, who lives in a women’s commune, she finds herself drawn into the possibility of a new start away from the world of men who have only let her down. Here, at Breach House, the women can be loud and dirty, live and eat abundantly, all while under the leadership of their gargantuan matriarch, Blythe.

But even among the women, there are power struggles, cruelty and transgressions that threaten their precarious way of life. When a group of men arrives on the farm, the commune’s existence is thrown into question, hurtling Iris and the other women towards an act of devastating violence.

Fierce and unapologetic, Spoilt Creatures is an intoxicating debut about transgression, sisterhood and the seductive nature of obsession. It pulls back the skin of patriarchal violence and examines the female rage that lurks beneath.

About the authors:

Ania Card lives in Brighton but was born and grew up in Poland. With nearly half of her life spent in the UK, she often finds herself between Poland and the UK, linguistically and culturally. She started writing in English when she arrived at Cardiff University, getting involved with the student cultural magazine ‘Quench’, where she became part of the editing team and headed the LGBTQ+ section. With a background in film theory and production, she has published film and music essays and reviews on independent platforms.

Amy Twigg was born in Kent, and is currently based in Surrey. Her novel Spoilt Creatures won the BPA Pitch Prize and was longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Competition. In 2024, she was selected as one of the Observer’s Best New Novelists.