Nicola Griffith - Stay

Nicola Griffith is the author of The Blue Place, Slow River , and Ammonite and has won the Nebula Award, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and five Lambda Awards. She is also the coeditor of the Bending the Landscape anthology series. At various times she has worked as a self-defense instructor, a rock & roll singer, a social worker, a teacher, and a laborer. She lives in Seattle.

Stay

The Blue Place

Slow River

Ammonite

“Griffith has a fine way with character and a sure talent.”

“ Stay is a bracing, stylized thriller, but Griffith’s real genius is in her portrayal of the brilliant, though damaged, Aud, who embodies the traits of the mythical Norse berserker; a woman who loses herself in the beauty and balletic control of pure violence yet seeks salvation…. A finely nuanced, frightening plunge into the dark heart of an exceptional woman.”

“Griffith’s tautly balanced prose perfectly complements her heroine’s erratic progress…. [She] skillfully links sensual details with emotional content, anchoring us firmly in Aud’s brutal, beautiful world.”

“ Stay is simply gorgeous—a powerful character study in the rough domain of mystery and adventure.”

“Griffith employs a crime thriller’s page-turning audacity and hard-boiled heroine without succumbing to cheap genre clichés. Like the protagonist, the language has a steely snap to it…. Stay is a captivating read.”

“Aud, the protagonist of this novel, is an intuitive, old-fashioned sleuth who would do Elmore Leonard proud.”

“Griffith’s prose is at once brutal and beautifully wrought. Stay has a central character both hardboiled and a softie at heart, and momentum like a car wreck.”

FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, JUNE 2003

Copyright © 2002 by Nicola Griffith

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2002.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Nan A. Talese/Doubleday edition as follows:

Griffith, Nicola.

Stay : a novel / Nicola Griffith.—1st ed.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-1-4000-7561-4

1. Police—Georgia—Atlanta—Fiction. 2. Atlanta (Ga.)—Fiction. 3. Policewomen—Fiction. 4. Lesbians—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3557.R48935 S73 2002

813’.54—dc21 2001052474

www.vintagebooks.com

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