Twenty-nine year old Devon is a luckless fisherman who ekes out a living on Hogg Island, a cork of rock and misery off the New England coast. He has no future, no opportunities, and only one last vestige of hope: a liaison with the mysterious and perhaps magical Louisa Cecelia Christensen, aka Queenie, the island’s maker of shadowboxes and miracles. Queenie is a bit of a miracle herself, a woman over 200 years old who has not physically aged beyond her adolescence. Local legend claims that an assignation with Queenie can either make a man his fortune or secure him an early grave. As Devon sees it, either fate would be an improvement.
In this shadowbox of a novella, stories within stories reveal the magic underlying the mundane. Proclaimed as “a masterful storyteller” by the New York Times Book Review, and as a “wordsmith extraordinaire” by Booklist, Randall Silvis has crafted in Flying Fish yet another poignant and powerful tale of life’s numinosity. As Jeff VanderMeer, editor of Best American Fantasy said of Randall Silvis’s acclaimed In A Town Called Mundomuerto, “Silvis's haunting prose renders reality strange whether anything actually fantastical occurs in his books or not.
”Flying Fish, says Nebula Award nominee Christopher Barzak, “is a pitch-perfect coming of age story that shimmers like light on water.”
