GennaRose Nethercott

In the tradition of modern fairy tales like Neil Gaiman's American Gods and Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver comes an immersive fantasy saga, a debut novel about estranged siblings who are reunited after receiving a mysterious inheritance. “A wonderfully imaginative, wholly enchanting novel of witness, survival, memory, and family that reads like a fairy tale godfathered by Neil Gaiman and Tim Burton in a wild America alive with wonders and devils alike. Thistlefoot shimmers with magic and mayhem and a thrilling emotional momentum.” —Libba Bray, bestselling author of The Diviners The Yaga siblings—Bellatine, a young woodworker, and Isaac, a wayfaring street performer and con artist—have been estranged since childhood, separated both by resentment and by wide miles of American highway. But when they learn that they are to receive an inheritance, the siblings agree to meet—only to discover that their bequest isn’t land or money, but something far stranger: a sentient house on chicken legs. Thistlefoot, as the house is called, has arrived from the Yagas’ ancestral home outside Kyiv—but not alone. A sinister figure known only as the Longshadow Man has tracked it to American shores, bearing with him violent secrets from the past: fiery memories that have hidden in Isaac and Bellatine’s blood for generations. As the Yaga siblings embark with Thistlefoot on a final cross-country tour of their family’s traveling theater show, the Longshadow Man follows in relentless pursuit, seeding destruction in his wake. Ultimately, time, magic, and legacy must collide—erupting in a powerful conflagration to determine who gets to remember the past and craft a new future. An enchanted adventure illuminated by Jewish myth and adorned with lyrical prose as tantalizing and sweet as briar berries, Thistlefoot is a sweeping epic rich in Eastern European folklore: a powerful and poignant exploration of healing from multi-generational trauma told by a bold new talent.

A Novel

Thistlefoot

Annabelle Gauthier

She is built of one thousand open mouths, and they are always wet at the jaw. 

He was a tragic hero, a mythic bard traversing an endless stream of unfamiliar lands. He spent hundreds of hours with his headphones on, sounding out the notes of traveler songs and old ballads, voices that sang of hardship and suffering and loneliness, always the loneliness, but in a fashion that sounded romantic somehow. As if to be unwanted and untethered was something beautiful. Something true.

In the barrel of each gun, a haunting waiting to fly.

Some part of him wondered if all his motion came from a place of yearning to be still. That maybe, the more small lives he tumbled through, the sooner he’d find one worth keeping.

Liv Wukasch

That was the role of the artist, after all: to see the world not only as it was, but as it could be. An empty stage (only wood and curtains and renter's debts) could become a forest inhabited by nine-headed birds and wise goats able to tell truth from lies. A canvas could become a lake, moony with magic toads, or a sky tangled with dragons. Surely, a day was the same. A blank page to fill with whatever made the imagination buzz. 

Thistlefoot quotes

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