ABOUT THIS BOOK

Solitary Mathilda has long harbored a conflicted enchantment bordering on rapture with the "Bright Young Things," the Bloomsbury Group, and their contemporaries of the '20s and '30s, and throughout her life her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists’ residency in Dun, a small European town in which Hermia was known to have lived during the '30s. The artists’ residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination. From champagne theft and Black Modernisms to art sabotage, alchemy, and a lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cult, Mathilda’s “Escapes” through modes of aesthetic expression lead her to question the convoluted ways truth is made and obscured.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Shola von Reinhold is a writer born and based in Glasgow.

REVIEWS

“Von Reinhold’s rich and glorious writing . . . reads as though—to put it in their own description of a room draped in candlelight—everything has been smeared with gold oil. . . . It’s more than just the bliss of representation: history here is feeling, not just narrative.”

-- Skye Arundhati Thomas Frieze Magazine

“Set amid an artist residency, this arresting debut effortlessly explores infatuation, reinvention, the erasure of black figures from history and gender identities in what marks von Reinhold as a unique new voice in literary fiction.”

-- Layla Haidrani AnOther Magazine

“An inspirational, cutting, exquisitely written, multilevel excavation of forgotten Black lives and an Afro-queer celebration of art, aesthetics, literature, and society.”

-- Paul Mendez, author of Rainbow Milk

“In choosing to conjure Black voices through historical revisionism, rather than, say, Afrofuturism or pure fiction, the novel produces a new archive—a radical reference tool populated by real and imagined historical figures, Anons who have been festooned, fleshed-out, and freed from the rude imposition of marginality, anonymity and defacement.”

-- Izabella Scott, White Review

“As a celebration of eccentric esprit, LOTE practises what it preaches by being stubbornly its own thing.”

-- Houman Barekat The Guardian

“LOTE is a rapturous first novel, a queer black fantasy with angels leaping off every page.”

-- Molara Wood Irish Times

"A heady novel that explores, in multiple genres and forms—comedy of errors, writing-retreat novel, book within a book—the erasure of Black art from gallery walls, history books, and archives. . . . Von Reinhold’s sensual sentences unfurl like ethereal greenery as you read."

-- Hannah Gold The Paris Review

" I will never stop recommending this book."

-- Laura John Joseph The Guardian

"Author Shola von Reinhold's very first book, LOTE, is a tour de force. . . . The luscious, textured writing is astonishingly good, full of surprises and little-known information."

-- Reginald Harris Gay & Lesbian Review

"A tour de force. . . . The luscious, textured writing is astonishingly good, full of surprises and little-known information. . . . Truly brilliant . . . on every level, leaving the reader very much wanting more."

-- Laura Moreno Bay Area Reporter

"Lote is like catnip for an academic audience: the novel is about intellectual labor and archival erasure, a kind of speculative fiction of Black trans/queer life largely absent from the British modernist canon. . . . Drop what you are doing and order a copy right now!"

-- Juno Jill Richards Public Books

"A heady trip through forgotten corners, told in von Reinhold’s lush and atmospheric style, and one of the best debut novels of last year. Recommended."

-- Roz Milner Lambda Literary Review

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