The Oxenbridge King

Tender, endearing, lyrical, surprising, and magical - think Hilary Mantel meets Sarah Winman with a dash of Neil Gaiman - The Oxenbridge King is a delight, a true original.

Imagine, if you will: the lost soul of King Richard III; a talking raven; a lonely angel; and a young woman called Molly Stern, who is heartbroken, grieving, and a bit stroppy. When their worlds collide, anything can happen.

Richard III is trapped in the afterlife, waiting with his guide, Raven, for an angel to take his soul to Heaven. Though he's been between worlds for hundreds of years, up in the real world it's 2013 and Molly Stern has a broken heart from losing her father and a recent breakup. Leaving London, Molly goes home to seek solace from her Aunt Peggy and Uncle Frank in Oxenbridge. But there are strange noises in the basement of her childhood house and nothing feels right, not even between Peggy and Frank. When the angel encounters Molly - and Raven at last finds the angel - life and the afterlife meet, with surprising and unexpected consequences.

Inspired by the discovery of the bones of Richard III beneath a car park in England, award-winning poet Christine Paice has fashioned a beautiful, singular, warm, endearing, and funny novel that weaves in and out of time and space and possibility. The Oxenbridge King is a tender and wise meditation on what survives of us when we're gone, and how, in the end, love and family are everything.

About the Author

Christine Paice is the author of the novel The Word Ghost, the children's book The Great Rock Whale, and two poetry collections, Staring at the Aral Sea and Mad Oaks. Her work has been published in The Best Australian Poems, Australian Love Poems, Prayers of a Secular World, Recent Work Press, and Not Very Quiet, and has been performed on BBC Radio 3, Jazz Alive on Vox FM, and Poetica on Radio National, and published in the UK, the USA, and Ireland. She won the prestigious Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize in 2009 and she has been shortlisted for the Blake Poetry Prize, the UK Bridport Prize, the Australian Catholic University Prize for Poetry, the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's International Poetry Prize, and the Alan Marshall Short Story Award. She works as a manuscript assessor and a creative writing mentor, and is an acclaimed observer of shadows, fields, and driveways.