I couldn’t be more excited about the artwork by Pei Yuan Li. Scroll down for a screenshot of Inanna’s announcement.

I don’t remember when I first read Pride and Prejudice, but it must have been as a teenager because I can remember high school conversations with my best friend about how much we love-hated Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

In 1995, I watched the BBC mini-series with my then-boyfriend’s mother, and I was really struck by how unjust Lydia’s fate was (which was, of course, part of Austen’s whole project across all her books: the perils of marriage). I thought a lot about how I would give her a happily-ever-after, which expanded to imagining happy endings for all of the women whose marriages in the original serve as a warning to the audience.

I’ve been dreaming about this book for most of my adult life, in an idle, lit-crit kind of way. When I decided to go for it and actually write the book, it came together extremely quickly, despite me making my own life difficult by relocating the whole thing to an 1840s generation ship. I feel like I spent half of my writing time just googling the dates of various inventions to work out what exactly they would have had access to, tech-wise, during the before-the-start-of-the-novel Regency space race.

Anyway, here is the clockwork chickadee and starry peach tree cover (!!):

Y’all, I am completely beside myself.

A few things you can do now to help this book find its audience: if you’re on Facebook or Instagram, share the above post (FB/IG); add the novel to your “want to read” shelf on Goodreads or Storygraph or similar sites; and, ask your local library to pre-order a copy.