The empire on which the sun never sets has turned its ambitions upon a land where it’s never even risen: Deep below the earth, Victorian Britain is colonizing Hell itself.The demons who once ran amok down there, torturing lost souls, were easy enough to subdue. The damned, left without their tormentors, have been put to work on cotton and tobacco plantations. As for the colonists, it takes all sorts to give up the comforts of home and make new lives on the infernal...

While isolated and friendless in World War II Cornwall, Nora, a precocious American adolescent, loses her younger half-brother in a car crash. Overwhelmed by grief, Nora’s mother becomes involved with Olaf Winter, the self-professed necromancer Nora believes is responsible for the accident. Desperate to win back her mother’s love from the nefarious Mr. Winter, Nora embarks on an epic journey and is plunged into a world of faeries, giants, and homunculi. Eventually she reaches the land of t...

"With this brilliant debut, Penner thoughtfully upends the tropes of postapocalyptic fiction" -- Publishers WeeklyStrange Labour is a powerful meditation on the meaning of humanity in a universe that is indifferent to our extinction, and a provocative re-imagining of many of the tropes and clichés that have shaped the post-apocalyptic novel. Most people have deserted the cities and towns to work themselves to death in the construction of monumental earthworks. The only adults unaff...

"With this brilliant debut, Penner thoughtfully upends the tropes of postapocalyptic fiction" -- Publishers WeeklyStrange Labour is a powerful meditation on the meaning of humanity in a universe that is indifferent to our extinction, and a provocative re-imagining of many of the tropes and clichés that have shaped the post-apocalyptic novel. Most people have deserted the cities and towns to work themselves to death in the construction of monumental earthworks. The only adults unaff...