Black Wine

by Candas Jane Dorsey

Overview

“Those who enjoy the work of such popular feminist speculative fiction writers as Joanna Russ and Ursula K. Le Guin will find much to admire here.” —Publishers Weekly
 
Winner of the IAFA Crawford, and the James Tiptree, Jr., and the Aurora awards, Black Wine beckons readers into a stark and richly realized world similar to yet very different from our own, to explore the many ways a woman can be cut off from her own history.  How does a woman survive, maintain her sense of self in such a place? An amnesiac slave girl struggles to learn about her past—and secure a future outside the oppressive society that binds her. A female adventurer confronts danger as she searches for her lost mother. A wife struggles within a marriage to a man she does not want. A world of female characters whose emotional journeys are intimately intertwined, where identity and history, language and perception, sexuality and oppression, unite them in their search for meaning, human connection, and ultimately, freedom.
 
“The careful braiding of self, places, and times insidiously pulls you in.—Elisabeth Vonarburg, author of The Silent City and The Maerlande Chronicles
 
“Like its title, Black Wine is rare and darkly glowing with iridescence. A taut, spare, wonderful creation.” —Edmonton Journal 
 
“A tantalizing, distinctive, sexy, and beautifully rendered first novel.” —Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504085076
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	06/20/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	285
Sales rank:	849,662
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Candas Jane Dorsey is a Canadian poet and novelist whose works span across genre boundaries, having written poetry, fiction, mainstream and speculative, short and long form, arts journalism and advocacy, television and stage scripts, magazine and newspaper articles, and reviews. She has served on the executive board of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, as editor-in-chief at The Books Collective from 1992 through 2005, and was a founder of SF Canada. In 1998, Dorsey received the Prix Aurora Award for her novel, Black Wine. Dorsey currently teaches and holds workshops and readings. She lives in Edmonton, Alberta.
 

What People are Saying About This

Ursula K. Le Guin

As brilliant as William Gibson, as complex as Gene Wolfe, with humanity and passion all her own, Candas Jane Dorsey isn't just a comer, she's a winner.

Editorial Reviews

The Canadian publisher/writer/poet's science fictional debut is a multistranded feminist identity-puzzler. On a strange colony world where technology boasts sailing ships, airships, advanced medicine, and forklifts, Dorsey weaves a design whose relationships gradually coalesce in the reader's mind. In the barbarous, slave- owning Land of the Dark Isles, the "waif" has lost her memory after a severe head injury; her companion is a mad old woman kept in a cage, who sometimes knows what the waif is thinking and keeps a diary written in her own blood. Much later, at the evil regent's palace, the waif will regain her past. Betrothed at birth to the regent, Essa grows up in a palace dominated by her depraved grandmother, the regent's lover; but rather than marry the regent, Essa flees into the Remarkable Mountains and joins a utopian community there. Trader Essa lives with a man who calls himself—and everything else—Minh; she travels by airship in a trading mission and, following a dispute among the crew, is pitched overboard—the same fate awaiting Essa after she leaves the Remarkable Mountains to confront her destiny and the regent's spies.

A tantalizing, distinctive, sexy, and beautifully rendered first novel.

Kirkus Reviews

An acclaimed poet and short-story writer in her native Canada, Dorsey is almost unknown in the States. That should change with the publication of this novel, her first. The narrative braids the lives of three women who are linked by their independent spirits as well as by blood. One is “the waif,” a young slave whose strange dreams and troubling half-memories hint at a past she can’t remember. When the waif is sold as a concubine to a prince in the distant northern Land of the Dark Isles, she begins a journey that will lead her to the secret of her past as well as to her future. Weaving the waif’s tale with that of Essa, an adventurous young woman determined to find her mother, and the journal entries of a woman escaping a husband she neither loves nor wants, Dorsey creates a complex and human story about freedom, love and the need to retain one’s own identity. The fantasy setting is stark, a world where the most brutal events are treated with cold matter-of-factness, but Dorsey’s writing is strong, even unflinching. Those who enjoy the work of such popular feminist speculative fiction writers as Joanna Russ and Ursula K. Le Guin will find much to admire here. (Jan.) FYI: Dorsey is head of Tesseract Books, a leading Canadian SF publisher.

Publisher’s Weekly

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From the Publisher