Henry VIII wants Anne Boleyn dead, but there’s just one small problem: she’s alive again by morning, sipping tea at the breakfast table. In the gilded hush of the Winter Palace, the Romanov sisters slip through time and waltz aboard a spaceship bound for the stars. A woman on the run strikes a sinister bargain with the ghost of Joan of Arc, but can she reclaim her body before sunrise?
With flickers of horror and dark humour, The Age of Calamities catapults us through sentient houses, looping timelines and haunted histories. Fiercely inventive and wickedly playful, these stories mark the arrival of a bold new voice in fiction-inviting the reader to confront the past, the present and themselves, all at once.
Senaa Ahmad’s short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Best Canadian Stories, and elsewhere.
She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and the Sunburst Award, and was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Fiction. The Age of Calamities is her first book.
Read: Dream Journals, Uncanny Magazine
First lines: Recently I’ve become obsessed with the eerie, sideways space between dreaming and waking. Those moments that make me feel less like a linearly assembled person. Probably there’s a technical term for this. Perhaps you’ve experienced it, too.