Synopses & Reviews
From cult phenomenon to award-winning literary sensation, "the sexiest action figure since James Bond" (Seattle Weekly) returns in an exhilarating new thriller. It doesn't matter how well trained you are, how big, how fast, how strong; there will always be someone out there bigger or faster or stronger. Always.
That's what Aud Torvingen teaches the students in her self-defense class. But the question is whether Aud really believes this lesson herself-and if not, what it will take for her to learn it.
Aud has trained herself to achieve a fierce, machine-like precision, in hand-to-hand combat as well as life. But in Always she is abruptly confronted with the limits of her own power. Her self-defense classes spin violently out of her grasp and, still reeling from the consequences, she embarks on a seemingly simple investigation of Seattle real estate fraud that pulls her into something far more complicated and dangerous than she had imagined.
Review
"Dennis Lehane, Andrew Vachss and James Lee Burke have each taken crime fiction to a new level and each has expanded the possibilities of the genre. Nicola Griffith is the next name on a very short list." -
The News Tribune "Griffith's prose is vivid and sure-footed, and Aud is still a compelling figure...
Always is the most accomplished Torvingen book yet." -
The Seattle Times "Yowza!...Fist-slamming physicality is beautifully balanced with raised emotional stakes as Griffith dares to take her lethally forceful heroine to a new level." -
Booklist (starred review) "Aud's story gets better with each book...the perfect noir hero." -
*Seattle WeeklyAbout the Author
Nicola Griffith: a native of Yorkshire, England, now a dual US/UK citizen. Author of six novels (Ammonite, Slow River, The Blue Place, Stay, Always, Hild) and a multi-media memoir (And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner notes to a writer's early life). Co-editor of the Bending the Landscape series of original queer f/sf/h stories. Essayist. Teacher. Blogger. Winner of the Nebula, Tiptree, World Fantasy, and 6 Lambda Literary Awards. (Also a BBC poetry prize, some Gaylactic Spectrum awards, the Premio Italia, the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, and others.) Wife of writer Kelley Eskridge (and co-owner of Sterling Editing). Nicola lives in Seattle, where she occasionally emerges from the seventh century to drink just the right amount of beer and take enormous delight in everything.