Just Announced: The Children's & YA Book Awards Winners Explore Now

Ormeshadow

Add to Wishlist

Ormeshadow

eBook

$4.99

View All Available Formats & Editions

eBook
$4.99

View All Available Formats & Editions

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.

WANT A NOOK? Explore Now

Buy As Gift

Related collections and offers

Overview

Winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Novella Award
Winner of the 2020 BFS Award

Acclaimed author Priya Sharma transports readers back in time with Ormeshadow, a coming-of-age story as dark and rich as good soil.

Burning with resentment and intrigue, this fantastical family drama invites readers to dig up the secrets of the Belman family, and wonder whether myths and legends are real enough to answer for a history of sin.

Uprooted from Bath by his father's failures, Gideon Belman finds himself stranded on Ormeshadow farm, an ancient place of chalk and ash and shadow. The land crests the Orme, a buried, sleeping dragon that dreams resentment, jealousy, estrangement, death. Or so the folklore says. Growing up in a house that hates him, Gideon finds his only comforts in the land. Gideon will live or die by the Orme, as all his family has.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Product Details
About the Author

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250241436
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/15/2019
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	944 KB

About the Author

PRIYA SHARMA's fiction has appeared in Interzone, Black Static, Nightmare, The Dark and Tor.com. She’s been anthologised in several of Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year series, Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Dark Fantasy&Horror series, Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction&Fantasy 2014, Steve Haynes’ Best British Fantasy 2014, and Johnny Main’s Best British Horror 2015. She’s also been on many Locus’ Recommended Reading Lists. “Fabulous Beasts” was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. She is a Grand Judge for the Aeon Award, an annual writing competition run by Albedo One, Ireland’s longest-running and foremost magazine of the Fantastic. A collection of some of Priya’s work, All the Fabulous Beasts, was released in 2018 from Undertow Publications.

Priya Sharma’s fiction has appeared in venues such as Interzone, Black Static, Nightmare, The Dark and Tor.com. “Fabulous Beasts” (Tor.com) was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. Priya is a Shirley Jackson Award and British Fantasy Award winner, and Locus Award finalist, for her short story collection “All the Fabulous Beasts” (Undertow Publications). Her novella “Ormeshadow” (Tor.com) won a Shirley Jackson Award and a British Fantasy Award. It was a 2022 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire finalist. Her latest novella "Pomegranates" (PS Publishing) is a finalist for a Shirley Jackson Award, a British Fantasy Award, and a World Fantasy Award. Her work has been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Czech, and Polish.

More information can be found at priyasharmafiction.wordpress.com

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Editorial Reviews

07/22/2019
British Fantasy Award–winner Sharma’s short novel reads like an old-fashioned idyll of rural life in Georgian England, but there is nothing idyllic about a hardscrabble family farm in the shadow of a hill that supposedly covers a sleeping Orme—a dragon. Young Gideon Belman’s life is upended when he and his parents are forced to leave their easy life in Bath, England, for reasons that are not at first clear to Gideon, and move in with his father’s rough-hewn rural family in Ormeshadow, but he’s intrigued by the stories of the dragon and the Belmans’ age-old responsibility to “shelter her and be there for her when she wakes.” Fear, abuse, tragedy, and heartbreak over the years ultimately push Gideon to see whether the legend is real or a bitter delusion. The story is episodic and the episodes don’t always seem to connect, but they gradually lead to a storm breaking over all of Ormeshadow. Gideon is the charming center in this fantastic but often grim pastoral. He clutches romantic ideals as both hope and self-defense, proving his worth to the reader before he seeks to prove it to the dragon. This short, sharp tale is often wrenching and worth savoring. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

08/01/2019
DEBUT Gideon Belman doesn't understand why he and his parents left their comfortable life in Bath, England, but now they've arrived at his uncle's Ormesleep Farm in Ormeshadow. Starting over in a small village, Gideon struggles to navigate new relatives, a crowded house, and work he never did before. As his father tells the story of the Orme, the sleeping dragon buried below their land, Gideon begins to recognize that the history between his father and uncle is no longer at rest. When tragedy strikes, and Gideon must deal with the traumatic aftermath, he turns to the Orme and the tales his father told to cope with the troubles that fester within Ormesleep Farm. VERDICT Fraught with emotional tension, built upon a harsh, beautiful setting, this first stand-alone novella from Sharma (All the Fabulous Beasts) is one to linger over. It offers a fantastical look at family secrets and a young boy who must navigate the sins of his kinfolk, discovering his own path along the way.—Kristi Chadwick, Massachusetts Lib. Syst., Northampton

Library Journal

"This novella reads like something torn out of the pages of Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy—a dark coming-of-age saga set in the pastoral, pre-modern English countryside."—Aurealis Magazine

"I love the structure of Ormeshadow—each chapter a kind of story unto itself and yet all flowing smoothly together. If you like graceful writing in your fantasy fiction, depth of character, and a connection to real life issues, this is a perfect read." —Jeffrey Ford

"This is exactly the kind of book that I enjoy. The skillful creation of atmosphere, the touching and painful interaction of characters, the sense of creeping dread, and the sheer beauty and skillfulness of Sharma's prose prove what I thought when I read her short stories: that she is one of the most powerful writers of fantastical fiction working today. The complexity of Ormeshadow's narrative is underscored by Sharma's use of THE telling detail, but not much else. This is a fully-realised world populated with living, breathing characters whose emotions positively seethe." —Tade Thompson

From the Publisher

2019-07-28
A classic coming-of-age story set in a dark fantasy world of myths and dragons unfolds amid waves of family drama and age-old mysteries.
In a mythic England in an undetermined time long passed, Gideon Belman and his parents are forced to relocate from their civilized and bookish life in Bath to the family farm, Ormeshadow, in a hardscrabble and desolate part of the country bordering the Orme, a sleeping dragon whose large slumbering shape is now covered with soil and grass. The Orme is the daughter of a great dragon king who was looked after by one of Gideon's ancestors following a long and fierce battle between dragons. The ancestor, also named Gideon, promised that generations of his family would keep and protect the dragon. On long walks with his father, Gideon learns the family secrets and legends, but in daily life on the farm, he becomes the victim of his brutal uncle Thomas' bitterness and resentments. There are tales of gold and treasure hidden deep within the body of the dragon, and a map to the fortune carved into the only chair at the Belmans' farm, but Thomas has no time or interest in stories of dragons or treasure. After the mysterious death of Gideon's father, Thomas is only interested in asserting his dominance over everyone around him, especially Gideon and his widowed mother. Driven to despair, Gideon sets off a chain of events that will change his life and the lives of everyone on the Orme forever. Although the story of the noble orphan boy has been told many times by writers from Charles Dickens to J.K. Rowling, author Sharma's (All the Fabulous Beasts, 2018) combination of dragons and sorrow set against a brutal country backdrop separates itself from the pack with a combination of solid writing and original mythology.
Despite the well-worn plot and unsatisfying conclusion, the novel's imagery and emotion make it worth the effort.

Kirkus Reviews

Related collections and offers

Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Related Subjects

Customer Reviews