# The Gloaming

## Kirsty Logan

'**The best lives leave a mark.** A bewitching tale of first love, shattering grief, and the dangerous magic that draws us home  
Mara’s island is one of stories and magic, but every story ends in the same way. She will finish her days on the cliff, turned to stone and gazing out at the horizon like all the islanders before her.  
Mara’s parents – a boxer and a ballerina – chose this enchanted place as a refuge from the turbulence of their previous lives; they wanted to bring up their children somewhere special and safe. But the island and the sea don’t care what people want, and when they claim a price from her family, Mara’s world unravels.  
It takes the arrival of Pearl, mysterious and irresistible, to light a spark in Mara again, and allow her to consider a different story for herself. The Gloaming is a gorgeous tale of love and grief, and the gap between fairy tales and real life.

## Suggested Books  
Here are a few unique books you might love, featuring cannibalistic nuns, Faustian bargains, shape-shifting mermaids, talking animals, alternate futures, parasitic aliens, swampcore haunted cabins, cryptids, and more:
- **Herculine by Grace Byron:** an all Trans girls commune haunted by demons.
- **The Reformatory by Tanarive Due:** a segregated reform school and the evil inside.
- **Wife Shaped Bodies by Laura Cranehill:** the trad wives are sprouting mushrooms.
- **A Dark and Drowning Tide by Allison Saft:** a dark academia quest for a magic spring.
- **Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell:** a new world where all the white people have disappeared.
- **The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones:** A Blackfeet vampire seeking vengeance.
- **The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling:** a medieval castle under siege and the cannibalistic fever dream that unfolds inside.
- **What We Feed to the Manticore by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri:** a collection of compelling short stories all told from the perspectives of animals.
- **After Love by Tanya Byrne:** a fantastical lesbian love story that literally transcends death itself.
- **Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris:** a grief-stricken Indigenous artist who arrives at a cabin in a remote, swampy forest, before strange things start to happen.
- **Fate's Bane by CL Clark:** sword-wielding, star-crossed lovers from rival clans, inspired by Celtic folklore.
- **As Many Souls as Stars by Natasha Siegel:** a Faustian Bargain between a witch and a demon, and their game of cat-and-mouse that spans multiple lifetimes.
- **A Feast for the Eyes by Alex Crespo:** four teenagers hunting the local cryptid that feeds on secrets.
- **They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran:** a red algae bloom causes strange mutations in a small Louisiana town.
- **The Seep by Chana Porter:** a parasitic alien invasion that creates a strange utopia, and one woman's quest to stop its spread.
- **The Gloaming by Kirsty Logan:** a hungry sea, a family beset by grief, and a strange woman who climbs up from the water.