Mulholland Books Releases Early Excerpt from Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls

by Sophy on Jul 17th, 2012

Mulholland Books, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, has made an early excerpt from Lauren Beukes‘ forthcoming novel, The Shining Girls, available online. The Shining Girls, the first in a two-book deal with the author of Moxyland and Zoo City, will be published in May 2013.

Beukes recently attended San Diego’s famed pop culture convention, Comic-Con, where Mulholland Books handed out customised Shining Girls buttons to anticipate the forthcoming publication. “Like” Mulholland Books on Facebook and they’ll let you have a more substantial slice of Beukes’ latest, pitted as “The Time Traveler’s Wife meets The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo“:

He clenches the orange plastic pony in the pocket of his sport coat. It is sweaty in his hand. Midsummer, here, is too hot for what he’s wearing. But he has learned to put on a uniform for this purpose; jeans in particular. He takes long strides-a man who walks because he’s got somewhere to be, despite his gimpy foot. Harper Curtis is not a moocher. And time waits for no one. Except when it does.

The girl is sitting cross-legged on the ground, her bare knees white and bony as birds’ skulls, but also grass stained. She looks up at the sound of his boots scrunching on the gravel and broken glass-long enough for him to see that her eyes are brown under that tangle of grubby curls-before she dismisses him and goes back to her business. Harper is disappointed. His personal preference is for blue, the color of the lake, out where it gets deep, where the shoreline disappears and it feels like you’re in the middle of the ocean. Brown is the color of shrimping, when the mud is all churned up in the shallows and you can’t see shit for shit.