Description
The Nights: Valentine’s Day Offer For a limited time only, get free postage on a copy of Helen Hopcroft’s steamy novella, The Nights. Perfect for that frisky Valentine’s Day gift, for oneself or a beloved, The Nights is an erotic retelling of the 1001 Nights. Every night, Scheherazade enchants the Sultan with stories and sex, weaving together a glittering string of fairy tales, and in the process using art to save her life.
The Nights features a foreword by acclaimed author, Carmel Bird, and a beautiful series of full colour illustrations by a team of Newcastle designers, with a cover image by artist/writer Hopcroft. This delicious novella was recently shortlisted for the Woollahra Digital Literary Award, with Hopcroft receiving Creative Australia’s Keesing Studio for Australian writers at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. The Nights is also available as an audio book narrated by the brilliant London-based actor, Kelly Burke.
Please note that The Nights features highly explicit sexual content and is only recommended for readers over the age of 18. Spineless Wonders reserves the right to request proof of age before purchase.
Praise
‘Lush, opulent and dripping with sensuality, this novella will take you on a journey through 1001 nights that you’d wish would never end.’
-Paris Rosemont, Banana Girl
I’ve narrated so many books over the years, but every now and then there’s a special one — one that’s impossible to keep a professional distance from, but which moves and changes you in the reading of it.
It’s difficult to describe how powerful this small book is. There’s the sheer poetry of the language. There’s the genuinely thrilling erotic writing (a rare thing indeed). There’s the deft weaving of the fictional, the magical, the soaring, the grotesque — by a woman coming into her power just when the world thinks her most powerless.
The Nights is a chimeric, ambivalent, searching novella. It tackles — with terrifying openminded-ness and a complete absence of sentimentality — those two impossible questions of what it means to be an artist and what it means to love. It collapses the boundaries between sex and art, body and language, fantasy and life.
And in the end it reminds us of something that, as a narrator, I should have known well: that words — and stories — live in the body. Story-telling is the most intimate and most transformative of acts. And we need it desperately if we are to survive.
-Kelly Burke, voice actor
About the author
Helen Hopcroft is a Tasmanian artist, performer, and writer. She holds a Royal College of Art MFA (Painting) and a Creative Writing PhD from Newcastle University.
Helen has written non-fiction books for the University of Newcastle and Hunter Valley Grammar School, with her publication list including The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, Art Monthly and The Griffith Review. Helen has been shortlisted for the 2022 and 2023 Newcastle Writers Festival joanne burns Microlit Award, and for the 2022 Nillumbik Prize for Contemporary Writing for her poem The Howling.
Helen once spent a year dressed as Marie Antoinette for a piece of performance art titled My Year as a Fairy Tale. She is currently writing a memoir about the experience. Helen lives in Maitland with her actor/musician husband Tony Jozef and daughter Sophie. She can be found online at @myyearasafairytale
Photograph by Joerg Lehmann
Distribution inquiries:
Our titles are distributed by NewSouth Books through Alliance Distribution Services:
Tel: 02 4390 1300
Email: adscs@alliancedist.com.au
www.newsouthbooks.com.au
