Divided Publishing

In Thrall

£ 11.99
£ 11.99

In ThrallJane DeLynn

£ 11.99

In Thrall

Jane DeLynn

A dazzling classic of lesbian adolescence.

The Irish Times

Dear Miss Maxfeld . . . What I’m really afraid of is that I am a homosexual human being. I wish you were one too but I don’t think it’s possible there could be so many in one school, do you? Probably there is only one person who is homosexual in one place at one time and that one person (I am afraid) is me . . .

After sixteen-year-old Lynn writes her thirty-seven-year-old English teacher a letter they embark on one of the funniest and saddest love affairs in fiction, shrouded in secrecy and guilt. Set in the year Kennedy was shot, all Lynn knows about “lezbos” is that they wear their hair in crew cuts, buy suits like her father’s, and sprout mustaches over their upper lips. Trying to pass, Lynn continues to neck with her boyfriend and make bigoted jokes with her friends. Feigning innocence with her parents, each night she checks the mirror for tell-tale signs of perversion. Profound, witty, poignant, and highly charged, In Thrall is the first in Jane DeLynn’s trilogy of novels on sexuality and authority. It is as believable in its depiction of a closeted teen as it is heartbreaking.

With an introduction by Colm Tóibín.

  • 978-1-7395161-6-1
  • 21.6 x 13.9 cm
  • 280 pp.
  • Paperback
  • 19 November 2024

About the author

Jane DeLynn is the author of the widely acclaimed novels Leash, Don Juan in the Village, and Some Do. Her novel Real Estate was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Mademoiselle, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times, the New York Observer and Tikkun, and she lived in Saudi Arabia as a correspondent for Mirabella and Rolling Stone during the Gulf War. She is also the author of three plays, and wrote the libretto for the children’s opera The Monkey Opera, composed by Roger Tréfousse, which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She lives in Los Angeles.

Endorsements (4)

Flawless comic timing.

Colm Tóibín

All Lynn’s phobias, aversions and hang-ups make her exaggerated but real . . . The great triumph of this novel is that DeLynn has captured the way adolescents felt, talked, and behaved during the early 1960s.

San Francisco Chronicle

A dazzlingly gritty exposure of a girlhood experience usually neglected by both private and public consciousness.

Reba Maybury

In Thrall is a beguiling account of the perversion, angst and ego of adolescence.

The Irish Times

Press (21)

Am I the monster?Natalie AdlerLux Magazine, 1407/2025
Undifferentiated SlimeMalin HayLondon Review of Books, Vol. 47, No. 1207/2025
Sweet Days of DisciplineMelissa AndersonBookforum, Winter 20252102/2025
Thrilling and bewilderingLucy ScholesThe TLS, No. 63582407/02/2025
Interview: Jane DeLynn by Taylor Lewandowski Taylor LewandowskiBOMB30/01/2025
Type on PaperEHFM21/01/2025
‘In Thrall’ is a flinty, funny novel about growing upJessica FerriThe Washington Post12/12/2024
"This feeling of uniqueness is part of the pattern": Jane DeLynn's In ThrallEkaterina IvanovaEra Journal, 19, Winter 20241712/2024
A Witty and Ironic Coming-of-Age Novel From 1982Brandon SanchezNew York Magazine's Making It newsletter (ed. Emily Gould)26/11/2024
Sex Cannot Be Taught, Just LearntEd NeedhamStrong Words, 542311/2024
The Strong Words Hot ListStrong Words24/11/2024
Five Books to Read in November 2024Something Curated22/11/2024
In ThrallJ. F.Los Angeles Times19/11/2024
In Thrall (from 2:05:18)Hannah MacInnes in for Ed VaizeyTimes Radio15/11/2024
Jane DeLynn: In ThrallMorgan BeckerThe Whitney Review, 411/2024
The Sheer Gusto of Jane DeLynnColm TóibínThe Nation11/11/2024
To Do: November 6-20Jasmine VojdaniNew York Magazine06/11/2024
A Pretty Girl, a Novel with Voices, and Ring-Tailed LemursSophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-SperlingThe Paris Review01/11/2024
In ThrallAndrew Chan4Columns01/11/2024

Flood Tide

£ 11.99
Pre order in rile* books
£ 11.99
Pre order in rile* books

Flood TideAna Schnabltrans. Rawley Grau

£ 11.99

Flood Tide

Ana Schnabl

trans. Rawley Grau

A dazzling mix of narrative styles (even genres), a linguistic rollercoaster, and a book that demands both close attention and literary sensibility . . . The reader is hooked.

Boštjan Videmšek

Mysterious, precise and haunting, Flood Tide suggests that every homecoming is a return to a crime scene.

Chris Kraus

In moderate physical decline, and with an immoderate weed habit, the novelist Dunja Anko returns home to the Adriatic coast to play detective and solve the mystery of her brother’s death. The going is arduous, the people inscrutable; her old friends have had years to forget – or to convince themselves they don’t remember. Dunja must contend with desire and disgust, curiosity and fear, as she begins to doubt her reasons for returning. Elegantly plotted, funny and self-reflexive, Flood Tide is a psychologically deft exploration of the trauma wrought by human limitation and indecision.

  • 978-1-7395161-5-4
  • 21.6 x 13.9  cm
  • 232 pp.
  • Paperback
  • October 2025

About the author

Ana Schnabl (b. 1985) is a Slovenian writer and editor. She writes for several Slovenian media outlets and is a monthly columnist for the Guardian. Her collection of short stories Razvezani (Beletrina, 2017) met with critical acclaim and won the Best Debut Award at the Slovenian Book Fair, followed by the Edo Budiša Award in Croatia; the collection has been translated into German and Serbian. Three years later Schnabl published her first novel Masterpiece (Mojstrovina, Beletrina, 2020). She toured Europe with the English, German and Serbian translations of the book, which included a residence in the Museumsquartier in Vienna, the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, and the first European Writer’s Festival in London. The novel was given favourable reviews and mentions in numerous Austrian, German and English media, and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel Flood Tide (Plima, Beletrina, 2022) was nominated for the Slovenian Kresnik Award. Her third novel September (Beletrina, 2024) won the Kresnik Award in 2025.

Photo: Luka Dakskobler

About the translator

Rawley Grau has been translating literary works from Slovenian for over twenty years, including by such first-rate novelists as Dušan Šarotar, Mojca Kumerdej, Sebastijan Pregelj, Gabriela Babnik and Vlado Žabot. Six of his translations have been longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, while his translations of Šarotar’s Panorama and Billiards at the Hotel Dobray were shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. He has also translated poetry by Miljana Cunta, Miklavž Komelj, Janez Ramoveš and Tomaž Šalamun, among others. In 2021, he received the prestigious Lavrin Diploma from the Association of Slovenian Literary Translators. Translations from other languages include A Science Not for the Earth: Selected Poems and Letters by the Russian poet Yevgeny Baratynsky, which received the AATSEEL prize for best scholarly translation, and, co-translated with Christina E. Kramer, The Long Coming of the Fire: Selected Poems by the modernist poet Aco Šopov, which won the 2025 International Dragi Award for best translation from Macedonian. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, he has lived in Ljubljana since the early 2000s.

Endorsements (7)

If you can imagine a story that’s an unsettling mix of psychological meltdown and detective story, featuring a stoned novelist wracked with back pain, going back to her hometown in Slovenia to masquerade as a Philip Marlowe wannabe to finally find out why her older brother died, and uncovering secrets about her friends and herself she probably would rather not have known, congratulations: you’ve just imagined Ana Schnabl’s brilliant Flood Tide. Readers, come for the moments of revelation, stay for the sight of a writer unravelling her characters until they’re left raw, and you’re left hooked.

Rishi Dastidar

Ana Schnabl’s new novel openly defies conventional literary genres: Are we reading a family drama, a troubled homecoming story or a marijuana-infused psychological novel? In a sleepy seaside town in contemporary Slovenia, nothing is what it seems, and no one is what they purport to be … An exciting, brilliantly written book, in which the reader shall not resist stepping into the detective’s shoes.

Nicoletta Asciuto

A singularly haunting and stylistically inventive novel on the primal scenes of family origins and sibling trauma. Revitalising tropes from the detective novel, elegy, and sharp social comedy in present-day coastal Slovenia, it sings and fizzes from the page.

Alice Blackhurst

Schnabl’s prose is matter of fact and yet somehow thrilling. She writes with absolute clarity. Stunning.

Molly Aitken

A fizzing fox in the hen-house of cosy British crime novels. Move over Richard Osman.

Tiffany Anne Tondut

A hometown return story with a turn of darkness: surreality both connecting and at once disconnecting the banal with the strangeness of grief.

Rose Cleary

We enter the story as if eavesdropping on real people – something the heroine herself confirms when she says the tale would not unfold as a psychological, sociological or crime novel, but as life itself.

Nada Breznik, RTV SLO