Earlyfate

By Nat Reeve

Published 10th October 2024

 9781917008068 / Paperback / £12.99

The whole Division will sneer when they read this, I know it. But how, pray tell, was I to discern just how wrong it would go?

 Pip Property is no stranger to disaster. Typically, they’ve got a plan, but now Dallyangle’s favourite dandy & part-time criminal is locked in the morgue of the crime-fighting Division gone rogue, accused of far more crimes than they’ve actually committed, with (at least) two bucolic burglars out to strangle them with their own cravat. Their lover – the semi-feral Welsh heiress Rosamond Nettleblack – has disappeared into dangerous hands. Enlisting the Division to save Rosamond might be Pip’s only hope, but the cravat designer and the chaotic vigilantes have never seen eye to eye. The Division is looking to prove themselves to a potential new patron – and trusting schemers like Pip is a risk the detectives don’t want to take.

Armed only with a borrowed notebook, threadbare charm, suits without cravat pins, and a swordstick everyone keeps confiscating, Pip must get the Division on-side, convince them that faith is a thing they can still have, and unravel the truth behind Rosamond’s disappearance before it’s too late.

From the author of Nettleblack, Earlyfate throws us back into the same madcap Neo-Victorian world, where queerness is a given and chaos is mandatory. 

"A tour-de-force of playfulness, earnestness and delight, Earlyfate is an immersive joy: clever, propulsive, swaggering and beguiling. This is at once an homage to the great fiction of the nineteenth century and something utterly new.
I was completely won over by it."

– Nell Stevens, author of Briefly, A Delicious Life 

"What a dramatic and delightful romp through the Victorian era! This is history like you have never seen it before: Nat Reeve shows you what is possible when we brush the dust off history and see the past for the lively,
exciting, queer place that it was!"

– Christine Lehnen, author of Remembering Women

“What a joy to be submerged once again in Nat Reeve's prodigious, idiosyncratic and radical imagination. Earlyfate is an immensely satisfying tangle of neo-Victorian intrigue, queer self-discovery, the fight for transformative justice and the achingly true-to-life depiction of how marginalised people - and family members - can hurt each other as we muddle our way towards solidarity. Come for the swordstick-wielding, stay for the reflexivity and tenderness. I'm so glad I read it.”

– Kit Heyam, author of Before We Were Trans

“Nat Reeve's Earlyfate takes us back to the chosen family of the Dallyangle Division, still suturing the wounds of ferrets and violent sibling duo the Sweetings. The book is a whorl of mystery, homicidal aristocracy, backstreets and bicycles wielded as weapons, patterned in the most devastatingly propulsive prose. There is intrigue with ferrets; profanities with fruits; restraints both erotic and carceral; and writing sharper than the keen edge of a family heirloom sword. It's a paisley of a novel, seamlessly brought together by a novelist and protagonist
cravat designer with the most impeccable charm.”

– Prue Bussey-Chamberlain, author of Bone Horn

Nat Reeve is a novelist and a Lecturer in English and Creative Writing. Nat has a PhD in Victorian Studies from Royal Holloway, and their debut novel Nettleblack was published by Cipher Press in 2022. Nettleblack follows a gang of queer misfit Victorian detectives causing chaos in a small country town, and its upcoming sequel, Earlyfate, follows a dandyish nonbinary cravat designer ruining said detectives’ week in every way possible.