Books

Abi Curtis’ most recent novel is The Headland, (2024) is published by feminist science fiction press Gold SF, part of Goldsmith’s Press.

A novel about the dark gifts of grief, what it means to belong, and the possibility that time and space may not be what we think they are.

It is the morning following a devastating hurricane on England’s south coast, and local painter Dolores is walking the shingle beach of the Headland. She spots something unusual lurking in a piece of driftwood—a color, a creature, perhaps something fostered by the twin forces of storm and atomic fallout. It’s all anyone has been talking about, after all, just months after Chernobyl and in the shadow of the local nuclear power station.

Decades later, her son Morgan returns to the Headland to arrange for Dolores’ funeral. The power station is about to be decommissioned, and the bleak landscape is best known now as a landing point for desperate immigrants from across the Channel. Morgan’s girlfriend is pregnant—an unexpected revelation that he is not at all sure about—and he is especially keen to discover what he can from his mother’s unusual cottage, especially about his father, whom he has never known. He uncovers the diary his mother wrote following the hurricane. It tells a story about Dolores and the strange being she discovers on the beach—a story which is both enthralling and heartrending. As he reads the journal, Morgan’s own experiences of the Headland become increasingly inexplicable. The journal challenges Morgan’s ideas about love and grief, parenthood and belonging, and the very fabric of time. As he unravels the mysteries of his mother’s past, he must come to terms with his own origins and face the growing violence from those who would threaten the peace of the Headland.

“The Headland hooked me from the very start with its powerful, sensory descriptions of the south coast and the great storm of 1987. Out of that wild night emerges the mysterious presence at the heart of this novel: an entity that glimmers, in Curtis’ poetic hands, with alien beauty and with the stunning force of grief. This is a strange, dark, gorgeous song of a novel.”

Naomi Booth, author of Sealed, Exit Management and Animals at Night

“A creaturely, stylish, kind-hearted book about a strong-headed woman and a piece of radioactive driftwood. THE HEADLAND made me see how the weird can be healing (and also deliciously weird).”

Daisy Hildyard, author of Hunters in the Snow and Emergency

Abi Curtis edited Blood & Cord: Writers on Early Parenthood, a collection of poems and prose from 18 commissioned writers. Blood & Cord is a raw exploration of new parenthood. Voicing silenced conversations about loss, grief, and loneliness, as well as the joys and laughter that are part and parcel of becoming a parent, the stories told within offer a refreshingly honest account of life after new life.

Abi Curtis’ first novel was Water & Glass (Cloud Lodge, 2017) and is a climate change, speculative fiction.

“An antediluvian thriller; an eco-disaster; a devastating love story; a conspiracy; a zoological dystopia. Speculative fiction is nothing without a beating heart, something real and human (or animal) at stake, and Water & Glass has this in boatloads. On every page Curtis combines a poet’s eye for the perfect, resonant detail with a blockbuster’s suspense and delivery on story. All the better that a large part of the narrative is facilitated by a woolly rat with a GoPro. As beautifully surreal and symbolic as it gets, there’s something unshakeably, alarmingly plausible about  this novel and its dramatisation of the next century: what we stand to lose and what may already be too late to save. An urgent, gorgeously written debut.”

— Luke Kennard, 2017 (Author of The Transition)

The Glass Delusion (2012) Salt Publishing

Winner of a 2013 Somerset Maugham Award

‘A stunning collection of fierce, rugged & muscular new poetry.’ (Somerset Maugham judges)

Tender, surprising, funny and sad, the poems of The Glass Delusion demonstrate a range of preoccupations, passions and interests unique in contemporary poetry. In its fascination with the who (wittily explored in ‘Marrying Doctor Who’) and the what (the quiddity of a giant squid in the stunning poem, ‘Squiddity’), with history and the everyday, Abi Curtis’s poetry has a strange beauty, a precision and reserve reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop. This is a remarkable volume. -Nicholas Royle, author of The Uncanny

These highly imaginative scenarios have the jubilation of discovery being made on the hoof. The poems are daring, wondrous and unexpectedly funny. Reading Curtis is like being blown offwards by a whisper. -Daljit Nagra

If Abi Curtis’s first collection plotted a course through myths both personal and legendary, The Glass Delusion wanders off from the breadcrumb trail altogether and finds its own way home through the forest of our collective unconscious. Reading her is to be reminded of the mystery of every living creature, to awake from your own delusions to find that reality is even stranger. -Luke Kennard

These poems playfully and tenderly blur the border between fact and fantasy, imbuing true stories with a melancholy magic and establishing fables which feel all too true. – Antony Dunn

Unexpected Weather (2009) Salt Publishing

Winner of the Crashaw Prize 2008