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Carrion Crow

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Pub Date Jun 30 2026 | Archive Date Jun 23 2026

Steerforth & Pushkin | Pushkin Press


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Description

There are some things only your mother can teach you . . .

In this viscerally dark, queer Victorian gothic, longing and transformation take wing through the secret selves we nurture when no one is watching.

“Haunting and vivid, creating that palpable sense of isolation…Parry’s atmospheric storytelling leaps off the page.” —Glamour


Marguerite Périgord is locked in the attic of her family home, a towering Chelsea house overlooking the stinking Thames.

For company she has a sewing machine, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, and a carrion crow who has come to nest in the rafters. Restless, she spends her waning energies on the fascinations of her own body, memorising Mrs. Beeton’s advice and longing for life outside.

Cécile Périgord has confined her daughter Marguerite for her own good.

Cécile is concerned that Marguerite’s engagement to a much older, near-penniless solicitor, will drag the family name – her husband’s name, that is – into disrepute. And for Cécile, who has worked hard at her own betterment, this simply won’t do. Cécile’s life has taught her that no matter how high a woman climbs she can just as readily fall.

Of course, both have their secrets, intentions and histories to hide. As Marguerite’s patience turns into rage, the boundaries of her mind and body start to fray.

And neither woman can recognise what the other is becoming.

Strange, intense, and darkly beautiful, this haunting gothic novel from award-winning author Heather Parry is a story of mothers and daughters, and the dual capacity for both great kindness and unfathomable cruelty.
There are some things only your mother can teach you . . .

In this viscerally dark, queer Victorian gothic, longing and transformation take wing through the secret selves we nurture when no one is...

Advance Praise

“As mesmerizing as it is surreal, Carrion Crow is a haunting gothic tapestry.” —Lucy Rose, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Lamb

“One of the best books I've read this year! . . . I loved it.” —Julia Armfield, author of Our Wives Under The Sea

“A gruesome, provocative, stylish fairytale . . . A true Gothic gem.” —Kaliane Bradley, bestselling author of The Ministry of Time

“One of the most important new voices in fiction, with Carrion Crow Heather Parry deduces an unutterable Gothic horror of class and gender . . . magnificent and devastating.” —Alan Moore, award-winning author of Watchmen and V for Vendetta

“Grizzly, compelling, and utterly claustrophobic" —Heather Darwent, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Things We Do to Our Friends

“Beautifully written with such dark, claustrophobic precision, exploring the devastating control we assert upon one another. Such an achievement.” —Rachelle Atalla, award-winning author of The Pharmacist

“Delicate, deftly written and enticingly obscene, Carrion Crow will captivate you from the first sentence and haunt you long after the story ends. I've never read anything quite like it.” —Jan Carson, prize-winning author of The Raptures

Carrion Crow, surely, will win awards . . . Every sentence oozes a crushed purple poetry, overripe with devastation and wretchedness . . . If you finish it feeling you might just skip dinner, then you also feel filled with awe for a writer so gifted at conveying this much ick in such luxuriant, refulgent style.” —Observer

“Nods to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and, more obliquely, to the mythic grotesquerie of Angela Carter’s early fiction.” The Times Literary Supplement

Carrion Crow may be set in a fetid late Victorian London and couched in lightly brocaded prose, but what lurks within is unmistakably red in tooth and claw, a creature nearer in kinship to Kathy Acker than to Sarah Waters . . . richly fecund and adult in every sense of the word.” —Guardian

Carrion Crow is a worthy entrant into the contemporary gothic hall of fame . . . I’m not sure the pure rancidness of this book will ever totally leave me” —Financial Times

“Haunting and vivid, creating that palpable sense of isolation…Parry’s atmospheric storytelling leaps off the page.” Glamour

“As mesmerizing as it is surreal, Carrion Crow is a haunting gothic tapestry.” —Lucy Rose, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Lamb

“One of the best books I've read this year! . . . I loved it.” ...


Available Editions

EDITION Paperback
ISBN 9781805680550
PRICE $17.95 (USD)
PAGES 256

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