Orpheus Builds A Girl
by Heather Parry
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Pub Date Sep 30 2025 | Archive Date Jul 29 2025
Steerforth & Pushkin | Pushkin Press
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Description
“A chilling exploration of power, love and grief, written with incredible precision by a major talent” — Julia Armfield, author of Our Wives Under the Sea
Based on a gruesome true story, this is a compelling, horrifying, and heartbreaking debut novel of sisterly love, sinister obsession, and the battle to control—and challenge—a perpetrator’s twisted version of events.
Wilhelm von Tore is dying. As he looks back on his life he reflects on his youth in Dresden, his grandmother and his medical career during WWII. But mostly, he remembers his darling Luci, the dark-haired beauty promised to him years before they met.
Though only together for a few months in her first life, Wilhelm knows their love is written in the stars. And he ensures that death is only the beginning. But through the cracks in Wilhelm’s story there is another voice–that of Gabriela, and she will not let this version of events go unchallenged. She tells instead the story of her fearless sister Luciana and the madman who robbed her from her grave.
Creepy yet intensely gripping, sinister yet shot through with mesmerizing beauty, this is the debut novel from Heather Parry, a rising literary star of the genre, longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize.
Advance Praise
"A chilling exploration of power, love and grief, written with incredible precision and an almost uncanny ear for voice. Heather Parry is a major talent" —Julia Armfield, author of Private Rites
"A compelling, creepy tale - and one that raises relevant questions about who "owns" a woman's body'" —Independent, Book of the Month
"Heather Parry is a literary star of the future. I've been a fan of her writing for years, and this novel is all I hoped for and more. Bold, sinister and debate-provoking" —Kirsty Logan, author of Things We Say in the Dark
"Superbly creepy from the start . . . Disturbing and compelling in equal measure" —The Big Issue
"Heather Parry is terrifyingly brilliant . . . Orpheus Builds a Girl is a sinister dark flower of a book, both intoxicating and beautiful" —Camilla Grudova, author of Children of Paradise
"I am in awe of this wonderful book. Truly gorgeous, generous and tender and brutal. Heather is an incredibly powerful writer" —Edward Carey, author of Little
"A wild, creepy, compelling read" —Jan Carson, author of The Raptures
"Dark, disturbing and woven through with a brilliant edge of hope. Heather Parry has created two complete and captivating voices that will play on my mind for a long, long time" —Kylie Whitehead, author of Absorbed
"The most eerily fascinating Gothic novel I've read in ages, filled with gorgeous, grotesque prose - as if Carlos Ruiz Zafon had written Lolita" —P. J. Ellis, author of Love & Other Scams
"A deliciously macabre voyage through one man's grotesque lunacy and the destruction he leaves in his wake" —Martin MacInnes, author of In Ascension
"Sinister, grotesque and strangely beautiful - this is an intensely gripping debut, the playground for vividly unforgettable characters and a twisting, seething story, all set on a background of mustily creeping dread. I loved every horrible moment" —Alice Ash, author of Paradise Block
"A tale of anguished and obsessive love, with a darker version of the truth scattered through it like shrapnel . . . Sumptuously written and impossible to step away from, Orpheus Builds a Girl is a haunting melody of a book" —Katie Hale, author of My Name is Monster
"An instant gothic classic. Parry's deft mastery of dual narrators and unflinching attention to macabre and horrifying detail makes for a read both unsettling and compelling" —Kenny Boyle, author of The Tick and the Tock of the Crocodile Clock
"Heather Parry explores how even in death women can lose agency of their bodies to the absolute extreme . . . Mesmerising, grotesque, sympathetic and gripping in equal measure" —Books From Scotland
"A chilling story of deranged infatuation, medical abuse, coercion and power" —The Skinny
"With the deftness of Doctor Frankenstein's sewing needle, debut novelist Heather Parry sews a gothic tapestry fit for the post-#MeToo era . . . Meticulously crafted, page-turning, disturbing and provocative" —Gutter Magazine
Available Editions
EDITION | Paperback |
ISBN | 9781805337966 |
PRICE | $17.95 (USD) |
PAGES | 320 |