Join us with Sofia Montrone and Grace Murray to discuss their latest novels: Nymph and Blank Canvas.

Join us with Sofia Montrone and Grace Murray to discuss their latest novels: Nymph - A gorgeous coming-of-age novel which revels in the exuberant highs and awkward lows of girlhood, taking place across a series of sun-drenched Italian summers. And Blank Canvas - A study in self-sabotage and yearning that crackles until it erupts, Blank Canvas follows a listless art student who constructs herself from lies.

Nymph

Ten-year-old Leo spends her mornings tidying the rooms of her nonna’s time-worn Italian hotel, quietly accumulating the junk and treasures left behind by guests – a pearl earring, a lock of hair. Her nights are suffused with her father’s liquor-spun tales of his childhood, mingled with stories of Greek heroes of old.

Years later, over another hot, endless Italian summer, the hotel is one of the only things in Leo’s life that has remained constant. An accident has knocked her family sideways; her brother Max is distant and Nonna has grown frail. But then she meets Dolores, an American girl who sets something alight in Leo that she didn’t know existed.Heat-soaked, sensual and steeped in an exquisite longing, Nymph traverses the extraordinary pains, soaring pleasures and many metamorphoses it takes to finally grow up.

Sofia Montrone is a writer based in New York. She teaches at Columbia University, where she earned her MFA. Her fiction and criticism have appeared in the Columbia Review, Quarto and Adroit.

Blank Canvas

Charlotte had never been close with her classmates but as she repeats her tale, their expressions soften into kindness. And so she learns there are things worth lying for: attention, affection, and, as she embarks on a relationship with fellow student Katarina, even love. All she needs to do is keep control of the threads that hold her lie – and her life – together.But six thousand miles away, alone in the grey two-up-two-down Staffordshire terrace she grew up in, her father is very much alive, watching television and drinking beer. Charlotte has always kept difficult truths at arm’s length, but his resolve to visit his distant daughter might just be the one thing she can’t control.

Grace Murray was born in 2003 and grew up in Norwich. She has recently graduated from Edinburgh University, where she read English Literature and found time to write between her studies and two part-time jobs. Her short fiction has been published in The London Magazine. In writing Blank Canvas, Grace set out to explore themes of Catholic guilt and queer identity, clashing moral codes and lies, and the opportunity for reinvention presented by moving between countries and settings.

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