Publisher Description
A haunted, surreal debut novel about an otherworldly young woman, her father, and her lover that culminates in a shocking moment of betrayal—one that upends our understanding of power, predation, and agency.
Ada and her father, touched by the power to heal illness, live on the edge of a village where they help sick locals—or “Cures”—by cracking open their damaged bodies or temporarily burying them in the reviving, dangerous Ground nearby. Ada, a being both more and less than human, is mostly uninterested in the Cures, until she meets a man named Samson. When they strike up an affair, to the displeasure of her father and Samson’s widowed, pregnant sister, Ada is torn between her old way of life and new possibilities with her lover—and eventually comes to a decision that will forever change Samson, the town, and the Ground itself.
Follow Me to Ground is fascinating and frightening, urgent and propulsive. In Ada, award-winning author Sue Rainsford has created an utterly bewitching heroine, one who challenges conventional ideas of womanhood and the secrets of the body. Slim but authoritative, Follow Me to Ground lingers long after its final page, pulling the reader into a dream between fairy tale and nightmare, desire and delusion, folktale and warning.
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“Brimming with dark folk lore and underworld energy, Rainsford’s stellar debut features a memorable heroine chafing against her monstrous isolation.”
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Publishers Weekly (starred review)
About Sue Rainsford
Sue Rainsford is a fiction and arts writer based in Dublin. A graduate of Trinity College, she completed her MFA degree in writing and literature at Bennington College, Vermont. She is a recipient of the VAI/DCC Critical Writing Award, the Arts Council Literature Bursary Award, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. When it was first published, Follow Me to Ground won the Kate O’Brien Award and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Award and the Republic of Consciousness Award.
About the Narrators
Kate Handford is a voice talent and Earphones Award–winning audiobook narrator.
Adam Sims, Earphones Award–winning narrator, is an actor who trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. His recordings for radio include Wenny Has Wings, The World According to Humphrey, and The Salamander Letter, all for the BBC. Film and theater credits include Band of Brothers on HBO; Lost in Space and The Madness of George III at the West Yorkshire Playhouse; Alice in Wonderland with the Royal Shakespeare Company; A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Regent’s Park; and Snake in Fridge at the Royal Exchange Theatre, for which he won the award for Best Actor at the Manchester Evening News Theatre Awards.
Louise Brealey, AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator, studied history at Cambridge University before studying acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in Manhattan. On television, she appeared in the long-running medical drama Casualty on BBC One in 2002, appearing in ninety-six episodes. Afterwards, she appeared in the BBC serialization of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, as well as Hotel Babylon, Law & Order: UK, Ripper Street, and in all series of Sherlock as Molly Hooper.
Amy Finegan is a voice talent and audiobook narrator.