My Name Is Monster
Katie Hale
“I do not know how she has survived until now. I do not know how I have survived either, come to think of it. I have just kept going. I have paid the right price. I have continued to live. Now, we will survive together. I will be her Mother, and she will be my Monster.”
Available as Paperback, eBook, Downloadable audio
Inspired by Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein, My Name Is Monster is a novel about power, about isolation, and about female relationships
‘Strikingly beautiful’ Guardian
‘Tough and tender’ Joanne Harris
After the Sickness has killed off her parents, and the bombs have fallen on the last safe cities, Monster emerges from the Arctic vault which has kept her alive. When she washes up on the coast of Scotland, everyone she knows is dead, and she believes she is alone in an empty world.
Slowly, piece by piece, she begins to rebuild a life. Until, one day, she finds a girl: another survivor, feral, and ready to be taught all that Monster knows. But as the lonely days pass, the lessons the girl learns are not always the ones Monster means to teach …
“Fresh and powerful … Hale’s writing is assured and … strikingly beautiful … Most of all, the book has a great generosity and empathy for monsterdom, and refreshingly allows its characters to find happiness without becoming more ordinary … Hale is certainly a skilful writer with a compelling voice, and her ideas are bold and promising”
guardian
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“A terrific piece of writing; tough and tender and insightful. Loved it”
Joanne Harris
“A complex, accomplished debut. The prose dazzles while the themes of feminism, power and fertility sneak in for a gut-punch. It kept me gripped from the first page, and the characters continue to live and breathe in my imagination”
Kirsty Logan, Author Of The Gracekeepers
“Taut, tough and sensitive, the narrative conjures up a devastated world, inhabited by two intriguing characters, with precision and real atmosphere”
daily Mail
“Katie Hale has written two fascinating, flawed and compelling characters and, with only two people and an empty world, has created a novel that is gripping, insightful and unique”
Claire Fuller, Author Of Our Endless Numbered Days
Katie Hale
Based in Cumbria, Katie Hale won a Northern Debut Award for her poetry collection, White Ghosts (Nine Arches, 2023). Katie is a former MacDowell Fellow and winner of the Palette Poetry Prize, Munster Chapbook Prize and Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize. Her short fiction has been longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. Her debut novel, My Name Is Monster, was published in 2019. She won a Northern Writers’ Award for Fiction in 2022 to work on The Edge of Solitude.
@halekatie | @katiescribbles | halekatie.com
