King Nyx

Anna Fort wants to be a supportive wife, even if that means accompanying her husband for the winter of 1918 to a remote, frozen island estate so he can finish his book as the guest of an eccentric millionaire. When she learns three girls are missing from a school run by their host, Anna realizes finding them is up to her — even if that means risking her husband's career, and possibly her life.

Her husband's masterpiece-in-progress features strange meteorological anomalies along with wild speculations about "facts" he believes scientists hide from the public. Most people think Charles Fort is a crackpot. That's about to change now that wealthy Claude Arkel is his patron.

Yet Anna is sure something's not right on Prosper Island, though the alarming return of her "troubles" makes her question her own sanity. Is the figure in the woods really the ghost of her long-lost friend Mary, or a product of her disturbed imagination? Accompanied reluctantly by a fellow guest, the elegant and troubled Stella Bixby, Anna embarks on a dangerous quest to find the missing girls before Arkel finds her — or her own mind unravels.

A contemporary feminist tale with a dreamlike, gothic setting, King Nyx reintroduces readers, twenty-five years after her acclaimed debut, to one of our most astonishingly imaginative storytellers.

"Enticing, shadowy, and wildly compelling, King Nyx transports the reader to a world where every ghost brings new revelations, and every secret, greater truth. A smoldering, feminist dream of a book." — Ami McKay, author of The Witches of New York

"A new novel from Kirsten Bakis is a reason to be wildly excited. King Nyx delivers all I could've hoped for from an author of such great gifts. A tale of gothic mystery and mounting dread with a narrator who is troubled, insightful, and quite funny at times. This is a novel of delicious disquiet. I sank into this book like it was a warm bed, or a warm grave. Some of its scenes even made their way into my dreams." — Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling

"Bakis' latest novel has the pacing and suspense of a smart literary thriller: it's almost impossible to put down once you've started it." — Kirkus Reviews

Kirsten Bakis teaches at the Yale Writers' Workshop. Her previous novel, Lives of the Monster Dogs, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, winner of the Bram Stoker Award for best first novel, and was shortlisted for the international Women's Prize for Fiction. She lives in New York's lower Hudson Valley.