Follow Me to Ground

One of Literary Hub’s Favorite Books of the Year Seethingly assured…like all the best horror, [Follow Me to Ground] is an impressive balancing act between judicious withholding and unnerving reveals. –The Guardian

A legitimately frightening (The New York Times Book Review) debut novel about an otherworldly young woman, her father, and her lover that culminates in a shocking moment of betrayal.

You’ve never encountered a father-daughter story like Rainsford’s slim debut (Entertainment Weekly). Ada and her father, touched by the power to heal illness, live on the edge of a village where they help sick locals–or Cures –by cracking open their damaged bodies or temporarily burying them in the reviving, dangerous Ground nearby. Ada, a being both more and less than human, is mostly uninterested in the Cures, until she meets a man named Samson–and they quickly strike up an affair. Soon, Ada is torn between her old way of life and new possibilities with her lover, and eventually she comes to a decision that will forever change Samson, the town, and the Ground itself.

Visceral in its descriptions…this unworldly story is a well-crafted and eerie exploration of desire…beautifully intoxicating (Shelf Awareness). In Ada, award-winning author Sue Rainsford has created an utterly bewitching heroine, one who challenges conventional ideas of womanhood and the secrets of the body. A triumph of imagination and myth-bending…equal parts beauty and horror [Follow Me to Ground is] unlike anything you will read this year (Tea Obreht).