Vodyanoy – Loosestrife

Vodyanoy: What is behind the illness of Roman? Which kind of experiment have been made on the population of a Polish town that no one wants to talk about it, even though everyone seems to know it? And what is the relationship with the creatures of Eastern Europe’s folklore called “Vodyanoy” (Water Spirits)?
In this masterful story, Liz Williams represents the anxiety, experienced by a family, doomed to worsen as the health of poor Roman.

Loosestrife: Aud loves Ellie, her baby girl. But no one knows who the father of Ellie is, not even Aud. Driven by poor economic conditions and the risk of having her baby taken away from her by the Social Service, Aud decides to leave London with her friend Danny, so as not to reveal the secret of her daughter’s birth. A touching, dark story of denied maternity and dangerous choices.

The Author: Liz Williams is a British science fiction writer. Her first novel, The Ghost Sister was published in 2001. Both this novel and her next one, Empire of Bones (2002) were nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. She is also the author of the Inspector Chen series.

She is the daughter of a stage magician and a Gothic novelist. She holds a PhD in Philosophy of Science from Cambridge. She has had short stories published in Asimov’s, Interzone, The Third Alternative and Visionary Tongue. From the mid-nineties until 2000, she lived and worked in Kazakhstan. Her experiences there are reflected in her 2003 novel Nine Layers of Sky. Her novels have been published in the US and the UK, while her third novel The Poison Master (2003) has been translated into Dutch.