Chapter Four: We Reveal Our Second Book! Already!

Hello!

Wow. Thank you so much for supporting us. We’re thrilled and honored to announce that our Kickstarter is fully funded, which means we get to keep publishing books!

Speaking of, meeting our Kickstarter goal means we’ve opened pre-orders for our second book. You can meet her below.

Pre-orders for The Witch of Prague and our cool merch via Kickstarter are open until November 6. And we hope to see you in New York City tomorrow (Wednesday!) and Seattle on Sunday for one of our book-rec parties!

With esteem,

Huw, Rachel, Lara and Rebekah

Introducing: The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo

It’s the Roaring Twenties, and writer Jade Yeo is exploring all the passions and perils of London high society. When she publishes a scathing review of Bloomsbury luminary Sebastian Hardie, she’s hardly expecting an invitation to his next party, much less to find herself the object of his romantic attentions.

Sparkling with charm and understated romance, The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo by Zen Cho is a delicious epistolary romp, brimming with social commentary and rife with wit.

Needs no introduction: author Zen Cho

“Zen is such a writing hero of mine that I was too scared to ask if she’d let us publish her,” says Rachel.

We love this little book: it was one of the first we dreamed about acquiring during the early days of Homeward. And so we made Lara reach out to Zen and ask.

Zen originally published Jade Yeo online more than a decade ago as a kind of “low-stakes experiment”, she says. Over the years, Jade accumulated a stalwart fan club, but has never appeared in print.

“I’ve been asked more than once whether I’d ever consider doing a print edition, so I’m very grateful—and honored!—that Homeward Books have volunteered to publish it as their second release,” says Zen. “For all the convenience of e-books, there’s still something really special about a book you can hold in your hand. I can’t wait to see it, and hope new readers find in it something that cheers their days.”

We’ve worked out a chic, tiny, and adorable design that will fit wonderfully into your hands—the baby sister of your hefty copy of The Witch of Prague—with original cover illustrations by the artist Kim Nguyen.

What other writers think about Jade Yeo

Jade Yeo has many friends among the writers of the world. We asked two long-standing fans if they would blurb it—that is, write a short opinion which we could use to describe and promote the book.

Martha Wells, of Murderbot fame, was thrilled to hear we were publishing Jade. “I remember how much I loved it,” she wrote back to us. Part of her blurb is going on the front cover, but here’s the whole thing: “This is a delightful romance. I loved seeing Jade make her way in the literary world of 1920s Britain with tenacity, wit, and guts.”

(Rebekah reckons the Murderbot series and Jade Yeo share more DNA than you might expect: they’re cosy, witty, and optimistic, but not frivolous: they’re underpinned by carefully drawn ideas about the way societies and relationships can be made.)

Then Rachel discovered that Rebecca Fraimow, co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones, was also a huge Jade Yeo fan. Rebecca told us she’s looking forward to adding it to her real-life bookshelf. When she sent us her blurb, she wrote: “I’ve just had a really phenomenal time re-reading it, so thank you for the excuse to do so!”

We think you might like Jade Yeo…

• If you like catastrophes and happy endings…

• If you like when reading a book feels a bit like sinking into a hot bath…

• If your ideal heroine has l’esprit considerably before she hits l’escalier…

• If you’ve ever read a guilty pleasure instead of a virtuous intention…

• If you’ve ever wanted to see That Poly Guy get told off…

• If you want your fluff with some anticolonial realness…

• If you support friendships between the bad and the mad…

Final word: more Zen

If you’re not familiar with Zen Cho’s work, Rachel has a couple of recommendations. She frequently teaches classes on short-story structure using Zen’s story ‘起狮，行礼 (Rising Lion—The Lion Bows)’. And she thinks that ‘The House of Aunts’ is the perfect teen vampire story: “funny, awkward, propulsive, tragic, and sweet.” Both appear in Zen’s short story collection Spirits Abroad, which is published by our friends at Small Beer Press.

As always, you can pre-order both of our books via our Kickstarter. Yippee!