Gunflower

The brilliant new short story collection from the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author of The Animals in That Country.

A family of cat farmers gets the chance to set the felines free. A group of chickens tells it like it is. A female-crewed ship plows through the patriarchy. A support group finds solace in a world without men.

With her trademark humor, energy, and flair, McKay offers hallucinogenic glimpses of places where dreams subsume reality, where childhood restarts, where humans behave like animals and animals talk like humans.

The stories in Gunflower explode and bloom in mesmerizing ways, showing the world both as it is and as it could be.

"Amidst a pile of shed skin and fur, McKay molds a kaleidoscopic and horrifyingly real portrait of life at the fringes. By turns gritty, surreal, and absurd, Gunflower isn't afraid to weigh flesh on the scales of our own judgments, a delicate balancing act between life and death, connection and disconnection. Perhaps part Kelly Link and Ottessa Moshfegh, McKay delivers an assured follow-up to The Animals in That Country in her own singular voice that zeroes in on our anxieties and existential crises with deft and often poetic flair." — Sequoia Nagamatsu, bestselling author of How High We Go in the Dark

"Startling, beautiful, and dangerous. McKay is the brightest of talents. We're lucky to have her." — Robbie Arnott, author of Limberlost

"Gunflower is like a swarm of small earthquakes: nothing is steady anymore, and the world feels bigger, scarier, almost transcendent in its strangeness." — Miles Allinson, author of In Moonland

Laura Jean McKay is the author of The Animals in That Country (Scribe, 2020) — winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Victorian Prize for Literature, and the ABIA Small Publishers Adult Book of the Year, and co-winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Laura is also the author of Holiday in Cambodia (Black Inc., 2013). She was awarded the NZSA Waitangi Day Literary Honours in 2022.