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A widowed writer begins to work on a biography of a novelist and artist—and soon uncovers bizarre parallels between her life and her subject's—in this chilling and singularly strange novella by a contemporary master of horror and fantasy.
The narrator of Lisa Tuttle's uncanny novella is a recent widow, a writer adrift. Not only has she lost her husband but her muse seems to have deserted her altogether. Her agent summons her to Edinburgh to discuss her next book. What will she tell him? At once the answer comes to her: she will write the biography of Helen Ralston, best known, if at all, as the subject of W.E. Logan's much-reproduced painting Circe, and the inspiration for his classic children's book, Hermine in Cloud-Land.
But Ralston was a novelist and artist in her own right, though her writing is no longer in print and her most radical painting, My Death, deemed too unsettling—malevolent even—to be shown in public. Over the months that follow, Ralston proves an astonishingly cooperative subject, even as her biographer uncovers eerie resonances between the older woman's history and her own. Whose biography is she writing—really?
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (10/23/2025)
I'm reading "The Measure", "All the Broken Places", "Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books", "My Death" by Lisa Tuttle, and "The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek", all for book groups. I'm enjoying each book for different reasons; of all 5, "All the Broken Places is my favorite. It delves mor...
-Marie_Webb
"Full of twists and turns, the book conjures the rich inner lives of women working on the fringes of artistic communities that often forget to memorialize or acknowledge them, even as Tuttle keeps taut the thread of suspense that animates the story. Powerful and empoweringly weird." —Kirkus Reviews
"It is [Tuttle's] influence, ringing loud and clear, on the award-winning work of authors like Carmen Maria Machado, Elizabeth McCracken, and Karen Russell that will finally lead grateful readers back to her." —Booklist
"Is [My Death] a chilling prediction, or does it point to a wished-for-ending, the consummation of a life?...originally published in 2004, repackaged as a modern classic, this riddling narrative laces fiction with fact, while touching upon (among other things) the mysteries of attraction, identity, and the fate of female creatives in the shadow of men." —Daily Mail
This information about My Death was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lisa Tuttle was born and raised in Texas and moved to Britain in the 1980s. Her first novel, Windhaven, co-written with George R.R. Martin, was followed by a dozen fantasy, science fiction, and horror adult and YA novels, and hundreds of award-winning short stories collected in several volumes, including A Nest of Nightmares and The Dead Hours of the Night. She is the author of The Encyclopedia of Feminism and currently writes a monthly science fiction review column for The Guardian. She lives with her husband and their daughter in Scotland.
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