Cork author Eibhlís seals deal for debut fantasy novel

CORK city-based poet and author Eibhlís Carcione is celebrating after securing a publishing deal for her debut fantasy novel for young people, Welcome to Dead Town, Raven McKay.

Independent book publisher Everything With Words have acquired the rights for the book and editor Mikka Haugaard said the story will “captivate readers young and old”.

“I’m thrilled to be publishing Welcome to Dead Town, Raven McKay,” Haugaard told The Bookseller magazine. “It’s a stunning, lyrical tale of loss that’s also a gripping ghost story. Eibhlís writes with a poet’s voice and eye.

“She has created something magical. The narrative shifts between bold simplicity and fantasy in a way that will captivate readers young and old.”

The synopsis reads: “When her parents disappear, 12-year-old Raven McKay is put into foster care with Kitty Stromsoe in the town of Grave’s Pass. It’s not an ordinary town. It’s a town where the living and the dead co-exist side by side. All Raven has is a battered beige suitcase with a faded black butterfly sticker and a note from her mum saying not to open the suitcase until the right time.”

Carcione’s poetry has previously been published in journals including Southword and The Moth and Coiscéim published her first collection of Irish-language poetry, Tonn Chlíodhna, in 2015.

The author said she was “thrilled to be joining all the wonderful writers at Everything With Words” and thanked Haugaard and her agent Silvia Molteni of Peters Fraser + Dunlop.

“Raven McKay found a gothic world of wonder in Dead Town and now she has found a perfect home at Everything With Words,” she told The Bookseller.