Anna Vaught Libri

This is a dark comedy set in Wales and a spectral reworking of Dickens’s Great Expectations. Almost is a boy, brought up by his sister, Perfection. He is shrouded by bereavement and surrounded by the hauntings of his family’s undead. He plays in the sea caves, visits graves, amongst mermaids, longing mermen, morticians, houses that respire and a poltergeist moss that grabs your foot. A cast of family and friends drawn from sea caves, the embalming table, the graveyard and the dark Clandestine House, which respires heavily and in which time has stopped. And like Pip, he sings into the sea and likes to tell stories – the key theme of the book which is the story of his life, his struggles and triumphs. He is thwarted in love but understands – the night he meets a ragged convict, for the convict is a merman, come on land – that he has deep and commanding powers.The poems are the author’s own.The Life of Almost is a short novel and the second title published by Patrician Press. The first was Killing Hapless Ally, a novel about mental health.

In this dark and toothsome collection, Anna Vaught enters a strange world of apocryphal feasts and disturbing banquets. Famished: eighteen stories to whet your appetite and ruin your dinner.

This collection of essays delves into complex themes such as love at first conversation, queerness, and intergenerational trauma, while also addressing motherhood, romance, and baby loss. Anna Vaught confronts dark subjects with unflinching honesty, yet her writing is characterized by a lively rhythm and buoyant language. The essays are both playful and deeply personal, offering intimate explorations of love and loss that resonate with readers on multiple levels.

Set against the haunting backdrop of the Wiltshire uplands, this lyrical tale intertwines themes of folklore, possession, and dark deeds involving white horses and shadows. Drawing inspiration from classic ghost stories, it evokes a chilling atmosphere reminiscent of M.R. James. Enhanced by Maya Chessman's stunning illustrations, the narrative promises to captivate readers with its enchanting yet eerie exploration of winter's mysteries and the supernatural.

Lady Gibson shot Mussolini in 1926 & was sent to a mental hospital. Lucia Joyce, daughter of James was a fellow inmate. It is a novel inspired by some of the most interesting women in the history of psychiatry whose identities were shaped by the rhetoric's of men, giving voice to individuals whose screams and whispers can no longer be heard.

These Envoys of Beauty is writing straight from the heart. Over twelve essays, Anna Vaught uses her relationship with the natural world to explore themes of loneliness, depression, and complex and sustained trauma within the family home, issues that shaped her early life and continue to have a far-reaching impact decades later.Vaught writes about how she oriented herself to the natural world and lived within it while growing up in a rural home; about wishing trees, talking streams, and her early knowledge of plants, animals, and botanical names; about her passionate relationship, even when very young, with foraging and what was edible, how things smelled, licking the rain from leaves, drinking, growing, and cooking. She writes about how nature fed and feeds her imagination, and how it gave her hope of something different beyond the world she experienced as a child and young person.

The Alchemy is a robust, frank and loving guide to an often opaque industry. As well as offering tips on working in gentle increments and re-imagining what productivity and the work of writing looks like, there is advice on sending out work and navigating the industry, looking after your mental health as you go. Let's do this together.

The Zebra and Lord Jones is a hopeful exploration of class, wealth and privilege, grief, colonialism, the landscape, the wars that men make, the families we find for ourselves, and why one lonely man stole a zebra in September 1940 - or perhaps why she stole him.