The Need

Speculative fiction of the highest calibre: one woman fights to retain her sense of self amidst the chaos of work, motherhood and alternative universes.

Molly is home on her own with two small children: one-year-old B, and four-year-old Viv. Her husband is away for two weeks and she is running between her job as a paleobotanist and looking after her children. She is exhausted, anxious, losing her grip on reality and, as dusk falls, she gets jumpy – are those footsteps out in the hall? What was that noise? She holds the children close, tries to pull herself together, of course they’re all safe. But moments later, in the sitting room, she sees it – a figure wearing a deer mask who climbs out of the chest in the centre of the room, looks at her and then walks out. And Molly has to follow…

Gripping, unsettling, completely original, this is outstanding speculative fiction, teasing out the possibilities of alternative universes, as well as an unnervingly acute exploration of motherhood, and the splitting of sense of self that can accompany it.

About the Author

Helen Phillips is the author of four books, most recently the collection Some Possible Solutions, which received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, was a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Award. Her collection And Yet They Were Happy was named a notable collection by The Story Prize.

Helen has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction and her work has appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times and Tin House, and on Selected Shorts. She is an assistant professor at Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, artist Adam Douglas Thompson, and their children.

www.helencphillips.com.