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Today, like whenever he comes, he will sit in the baroque alcove and fantasise about visiting the house in the 1890s, until he gets violently ejected from his own vision, recalling, with a shock, that he would probably not be invited to such a house in such a period.Įven his fantasies will not contain his Blackness, which will sometimes seem to keep him out of Arcadia however many loopholes he finds, like the presence of Black students living in Edinburgh since the 1850s, at least. And it will be an old hotel painted wall panels and a tinted glass dome, apparently once the house of a society hostess who was conveyed around Edinburgh in a coach pulled by zebras towards the end of the 19th Century. The artists’ residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination, but will she be able to break the thrall of her Transfixions?įrom champagne theft and Black Modernisms, to art sabotage, alchemy and lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cults, Mathilda’s journey through modes of aesthetic expression guides her to truth and the convoluted ways it is made and obscured.Bim will get to the hotel bar first. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists’ residency in Dun, a small European town Hermia was known to have lived in during the 30s. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things that she adores, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Solitary Mathilda has long been enamored with the ‘Bright Young Things’ of the 20s, and throughout her life, her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. Lush and frothy, incisive and witty, Shola von Reinhold’s decadent queer literary debut immerses readers in the pursuit of aesthetics and beauty, while interrogating the removal and obscurement of Black figures from history. WINNER of The Republic of Consciousness Prize 2021.

WINNER of the James Tait Black Prize 2021.