Her Own Devices is a novel in four parts begun in 2019, to be published by Guernica World Editions in September 2024. It’s a sequel to my 2018 international conspiracy thriller Turkey Shoot, but it’s not just a thriller. I describe it as women’s’ crime fiction with magical and autofictional elements, in which a young single mother accidentally finds herself combating child traffickers in her adopted city of Piraeus, Greece with DIY technology.
Find links to some samples on this page along with an audio clip. And find the book at the Perfidy Press Bookstore at bookshop.org or wherever you buy books online.
You might want to read the précis first. There’s also a promo. The novel features three distinct narrators: Mahmoud, Anna, and me (referred to as The Writer, also voicing the editor Anna interacts with).
You can see what I mean in Anna’s opening statement in her own words, and listen to an audio clip of Mahmoud’s spooky opening soliloquy. Then visit any of three chapters excerpted from earlier versions at The Write Launch, should you like.
- Sneak Preview, the novel’s original announcement on this site
- About This Writer’s Book, Anna’s Foreword
- A five-minute audio track of Mahmoud Al Ramadi’s introduction to Part One, speaking from limbo, narrated by the author:
From The Write Launch:
- Her Own Devices: Part 1, Chapter 3
- Her Own Devices: Part 2, Chapter 8
- Her Own Devices: Part 2, Chapter 9
Related Writings
From bookscover2cover.com
Two essays by Geoffrey Dutton document how Her Own Devices was first imagined and its narrative structured:
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- Tell Me a Fractal, May 17, 2022 (revised version of 2019 article on medium.com)
- On Telling a Fractal: Parsing Patterns in My Prose, May 27, 2022
A review of Disclaimer by Renee Knight (2015) in conjunction with Her Own Devices:
And as a lot of what transpires in Her Own Devices follows events from Turkey Shoot, you might want to read that too; also available at bookshop.org.