Nightshade Lynn Hutchinson Lee 9781998336272

A gorgeous, Gothic, Romany coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the 1980s Southern Ontario tobacco belt-with a dash of magic realism.

Longing for glamour and riches and freedom, Zelda is a young woman who chafes against her Romany identity and her family's poverty. Everything changes when she's lured away from working alongside her mother and aunts and other migrant workers in the tobacco fields and is hired as an assistant and good luck charm to the charismatic Trixie Tormentine.

What starts out as a summer of ease and access to the unfettered wealth of the Tormentines-Trixie's husband Jack owns the tobacco farm that employs Zelda's family and friends-unspools into dangerous displays of power and manipulation. One of the Romany family's puppets, grandmother Puri Dai, acts as Zelda's confidante and mentor, and warns her about the devil of the tobacco fields, a harbinger of destruction.

As Zelda struggles with her simmering feelings toward the Tormentines, the devil appears to her one night in a motel parking lot. Can Puri Dai's love pull Zelda back from the brink and into a new future? The fate of her family depends on it.

Lynn Hutchinson Lee is an award-winning author of Anglo-Romany descent. Her short fiction was published in Room, Wagtail: The Roma Women's Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere. An excerpt from Nightshade won first prize in the 2022 Joy Kogawa Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2022 Swedish Writers' Festival Prize. In 2023, Nightshade was shortlisted for the Guernica Prize. Her flash fiction won the Editors' Choice Award in Guernica's This Will Only Take a Minute. Her novella Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens is published with Stelliform Press. Lynn writes in Toronto, cooks for friends, feeds birds, and gets lost in her garden.

"Lynn Hutchinson Lee's moving story about a Roma family working in the tobacco fields of southwestern Ontario during the 80s is a tour de force. Matriarch Rhodie and her sisters and daughter fight to preserve their culture while struggling with poverty, sub-par housing, cheating supervisors, accidents and more. The family's struggles are interwoven with descriptions of nature-plants, birds and stars, crafted in a haunting poetic prose. Simultaneously prose poem and page-turner, Nightshade draws us into the lives of its characters. Readers will come to love fragile Liza-May, who tends to ill and injured birds, feisty Lilly, who stands up to injustice, and protagonist Zelda. Eighteen, Zelda longs for her own life and, like so many young women before her, makes both missteps and giant steps discovering what her own path might be. And the puppets! Grandmother puppet Puri Dai's voice infuses the novel with a gentle wisdom, as she attempts to protect both her wooden and human charges."-Ursula Pflug, author of Mountain

"Lynn Hutchinson Lee's novel Nightshade gives a very rare and precious insight into a Romany family and community, their language and history; and I for one am so grateful it has been written. Reading the novel, the author's words come from a wise and very old nomadic tradition. For many of us in the disconnected twenty-first century, it is time to speak about our hidden Romany identity and heritage. Today, it is about being a participant in a global story. Reading Nightshade, I felt like I was coming home."-Frances Roberts Reilly, author of Parramisha: A Romani Poetry Collection