Coming Bad Days: Devastating new fiction from Sarah Bernstein

The Coming Bad Days announces the arrival of a startling new voice in fiction: intelligent, brutal, sure, and devastatingly funny.

A new novel of solitude and desire, institutions and people, reading and the imagination. The Coming Bad Days is a penetrating portrait of feminine vulnerability and cruelty by Edinburgh based writer Sarah Bernstein and we CAN'T WAIT to get talking about it with everyone! Our host for this Lighthouse launch is Christina Neuwirth, author of Amphibian.

'The truth is that sometimes we just want the worst to happen.'

Reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard, Rachel Cusk and Gwendoline Riley, The Coming Back Days announces a phenomenal new talent. 'The Coming Bad Days is raw, dazzling and bracingly new. A vividly original novel about the fractured difficulty of living.' -- Rebecca Tamás, author of Strangers

A woman leaves the man she lives with and moves to a low stone cottage in a university town. She joins an academic department and, high up in her office on the thirteenth floor, begins a research project on the poet Paul Celan. She knows nothing of Celan, still less of her new neighbours or colleagues.

She is in self-imposed exile, hoping to find dignity in her loneliness. Like everywhere, the abiding feeling in the city is one of paranoia. The weather is deteriorating, the ordinary lives of women are in peril, and an unexplained curfew has been imposed.

But then she meets Clara, a woman who is her exact opposite: decisive, productive and assured. As their friendship grows in intimacy Clara suggests another way of living – until an act of violence threatens to sever everything between them.

The Writer

Sarah Bernstein is from Montreal, Quebec and lives in Scotland where she teaches at Edinburgh University. Her fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in tender, Contemporary Women’s Writing, MAP and Cumulus. Now Comes the Lightning, a collection of poems, was published by Pedlar Press in 2015.

The Host

Originally from Austria, Christina Neuwirth is a researcher, writer and bookseller based in Edinburgh. They were one of Queer Words Project Scotland’s five Emerging Writers 2018. Their debut novella Amphibian was published by Speculative Books in 2018 and was shortlisted for multiple awards, including the Saltire Society First Book Award. Christina is a Lighthouse bookseller as well as a library assistant with @bipanlibrary, and is currently working on a novel, and pursuing a PhD. You can find more information and say Hi on www.christinaneuwirth.com.