Cover Design: Estuary English
Dreamtime
'So, where is he then, your dad?' The world may be on a precipice but Sol, fresh from Tucson-desert rehab, finally has an answer to the question that has dogged her since childhood. And not a moment too soon. With aviation grinding to a halt in the face of global climate meltdown, this is the last chance to connect with her absentee father, a US marine stationed in Okinawa.
“Exquisite and hallucinogenic” — Fiction to look out for in 2021, The Observer
“One of the most staggering, haunting works of fiction I've read this year.” — High Rise and Ink
To mend their broken past Sol and her lovelorn friend Kit must journey across poisoned oceans to the furthest reaches of the Japanese archipelago, a place where sea, sky and earth converge at the forefront of an encroaching environmental and geopolitical catastrophe; a place battered by the relentless tides of history, haunted by the ghosts of its past, where the real and the virtual, the dreamed and the lived, are ever harder to define. In Dreamtime Venetia Welby paints a terrifying and captivating vision of our near future and takes us on a vertiginous odyssey into the unknown.
“A prowling strangeness stalks through the latter half of the novel; it hums and jitters, leaving an electric taste in your mouth … Dreamtime is burly with ambition.” — Alex Diggins, Exacting Clam
“A super-charged and simmering narrative with a twist, which sucks you right in. An unusual novel that lingers in the mind.” — Bookblast
Cover Design: Estuary English
Mother of Darkness
“A lyrical, wry and darkly comic debut that navigates the no man's land of loss, addiction and religious zeal, Mother of Darkness is a dazzlingly original work from an unmistakeable new voice.”
“A clever and brilliant debut.” — The Last Word Book Review
“I loved this book - I read it twice.” — Julia Sutton, author of A Sea of Straw
“Welby’s nimble prose and ambitious conceptual thrust reminds the reader of Will Self’s work (albeit in a more digestible form) and Soho legend Sebastian Horsley’s phenomenal Dandy in the Underworld.” — Volteface
“Mother of Darkness is one intense piece of fiction, as Matty’s dreams evolve into the belief that he is the chosen vessel of a new god, Feracor. There are several strands of writing in the novel, including the psychotherapist’s reports; the life writing that she has suggested Matty attempt; and the ‘speeches’ of Feracor. Piece them all together, and the truth emerges eventually. The narrative pull of Welby’s novel in getting to that point is quite something.” — David Hebblethwaite
About the Author
Venetia Welby is a writer and journalist who has lived and worked on four continents. She is the author of two novels — Dreamtime, an Observer book of the year, and Mother of Darkness. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The London Magazine, Irish Times, Spectator etc and in various collections, including Trauma, Garden Among Fires, and the Parracombe Prize Anthology ’23. Venetia lives in the UK.
