“Extremely intense and powerfully intriguing.” —Waterstone’s
“[Ashworth] Evokes a damaged mind with the empathy and confidence of Ruth Rendell.” —The Times (London)
Cold Light by Jenn Ashworth is a hauntingly beautiful and shocking psychological thriller in the vein of the bestselling novels of Tana French—a darkly compelling story of secrets between two teenage friends in a small English town. Ashworth already has created great buzz in the U.K. thanks to her stunning debut novel, A Kind of Intimacy, winner of the prestigious Betty Trask Award, and now Cold Light places her in elite literary company—alongside Laura Lippman, Kate Atkinson, and other acclaimed masters of intelligent, emotionally powerful mystery and suspense. An unforgettable tale of friendship and memory—and the shattering truth behind a forgotten dead body newly unearthed—Cold Light is a most welcome addition to the crime fiction and thriller ranks.

Cold Light: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Ashworth, Jenn

Genre Fiction

William Morrow Paperbacks

“Extremely intense and powerfully intriguing.”—Waterstone’s“[Ashworth] Evokes a damaged mind with the empathy and confidence of Ruth Rendell.”—The Times (London)Cold Light by Jenn Ashworth is a hauntingly beautiful and shocking psychological thriller in the vein of the bestselling novels of Tana French—a darkly compelling story of secrets between two teenage friends in a small English town. Ashworth already has created great buzz in the U.K. thanks to her stunning debut novel, A Kind of Intimacy, winner of the prestigious Betty Trask Award, and now Cold Light places her in elite literary company—alongside Laura Lippman, Kate Atkinson, and other acclaimed masters of intelligent, emotionally powerful mystery and suspense. An unforgettable tale of friendship and memory—and the shattering truth behind a forgotten dead body newly unearthed—Cold Light is a most welcome addition to the crime fiction and thriller ranks.

William Morrow Large Print

The Mechanics' Institute Review 2017: 14: Short Stories

Literary

MA Creative Writing, Birkbeck

A Kind of Intimacy is a sardonic look at self-help gone disastrously wrong. In Annie Fairhurst's world, the past can never loosen its grip on the present, and the persistent exhortation to better oneself and one's lot in life urges her, time and time again, to embark on thoroghly terrifying journeys. Annie is obese, socially awkward, yet determined to escape a difficult past and to start over. She moves into a new neighborhood, bringing virtually nothing from her previous life with her. Then again, there is very little of her previous life left to bring. She has wiped the slate clean. Neil, Annie's unsuspecting new neighbor, makes the mistake of being friendly and, convinced his friendliness indicates that he is enamored of her, Annie's bizzare behavior escalates from petulant to, finally, criminal. All the while, Annie is convinced that she is the one to whom life has dealt a foul hand, that she is the real victim. As the persona she has so meticulusly created begins to crumble, a bloody and disastrous finale seems inevitable.

A Kind of Intimacy

Sceptre

A present contains a monstrous secret. An uninvited guest haunts a Christmas party. A shadow slips across the floor by firelight. A festive entertainment ends in darkness and screams.
Who knows what haunts the night at the dark point of the year? This collection of seasonal chillers looks beneath Christmas cheer to a world of ghosts and horrors, mixing terrifying modern fiction with classic stories by masters of the macabre. From Neil Gaiman and M. R. James to Muriel Spark and E. Nesbit, there are stories here to make the hardiest soul quail - so find a comfy chair, lock the door, ignore the cold breath on your neck and get ready to welcome in the real spirits of Christmas.

Ghosts of Christmas Past: A chilling collection of modern and classic Christmas ghost stories

NESBIT, E.

JEROME, JEROME K.

Benson, E.F.

Aickman, Robert

Gaiman,Neil

Link, Kelly

HARTLEY, L.P.

JAMES, M.R.

De Bernières, Louis

Capes, Benard

Copwer, Frank

Sparks, Muriel

John Murray

Ghosted: A Love Story

* SHORTLISTED FOR THE PORTICO PRIZE 2022 * A deeply affecting and unconventional love story, shot through with anger, black humour and grief. One ordinary morning, Laurie's husband Mark vanishes, leaving behind his phone and wallet. For weeks, she tells no one, carrying on her job as a cleaner at the local university, visiting her tricky, dementia-suffering father and holing up in her tower-block flat with a bottle to hand. When she finally reports Mark as missing, the police are suspicious. Why did she take so long? Wasn't she worried? It turns out there are many more mysteries in Laurie's account of events, though not just because she glosses over the facts. At the time, she couldn't explain much of her behaviour herself. But as she looks back on the ensuing wreckage - the friendships broken, the wild accusations she made, the one-night stand - she can see more clearly what lay behind it. And if it's not too late, she can see how she might repair the damage and, most of all, forgive herself.

Humor & Satire

Review\nUnnerving, absorbing . . . Ashworth's setting is a small unnamed northwestern university city . . . a clever, gripping, refreshingly urban setting for a novel that plays with tropes from not just ghost stories but also murder mysteries . . . The mentally restless Laurie is a miraculous creation, somehow managing to be both a not entirely reliable narrator and yet solidly sympathetic. Piercingly human and darkly funny, Ghosted is a tender, beautifully controlled account of expectations knocked off course.―Sunday Times\nUnnerving, absorbing . . . Ashworth's setting is a small unnamed northwestern university city . . . a clever, gripping, refreshingly urban setting for a novel that plays with tropes from not just ghost stories but also murder mysteries . . . The mentally restless Laurie is a miraculous creation, somehow managing to be both a not entirely reliable narrator and yet solidly sympathetic. Piercingly human and darkly funny, Ghosted is a tender, beautifully controlled account of expectations knocked off course.―Sunday Times\nFrom her debut novel, A Kind of Intimacy, Ashworth's work has explored physical discomfort, violence and sexual misadventure. She writes explicitly of physicality and its often petrifying opposite - disembodiment. There are moments in Ghosted that are at once terrifying and blackly humorous . . . an impressive reminder of the uneasy silence reverberating on the other side of grief.―Guardian\nFrom her debut novel, A Kind of Intimacy, Ashworth's work has explored physical discomfort, violence and sexual misadventure. She writes explicitly of physicality and its often petrifying opposite - disembodiment. There are moments in Ghosted that are at once terrifying and blackly humorous . . . an impressive reminder of the uneasy silence reverberating on the other side of grief.―Guardian\nSince her 2009 debut A Kind of Intimacy, Jenn Ashworth has been quietly collecting honours for her distinctive, empathetic and sharply observed novels, of which Ghosted is another . . . She writes powerfully and movingly about lives shaped by need, love and loss, as well as the solipsism of ferocious grief.―Daily Mail\nSince her 2009 debut A Kind of Intimacy, Jenn Ashworth has been quietly collecting honours for her distinctive, empathetic and sharply observed novels, of which Ghosted is another . . . She writes powerfully and movingly about lives shaped by need, love and loss, as well as the solipsism of ferocious grief.―Daily Mail\nGhosts, buried trauma and lingering absences suffuse this darkly funny and compelling novel.―Tatler\nGhosts, buried trauma and lingering absences suffuse this darkly funny and compelling novel.―Tatler\nA revelatory portrait of a marriage. Although Laurie is acerbic and funny, this is an immeasurably sad read, aching with the unacknowledged grief of a complicated couple who have lost more than they can say.―Daily Mirror\nA revelatory portrait of a marriage. Although Laurie is acerbic and funny, this is an immeasurably sad read, aching with the unacknowledged grief of a complicated couple who have lost more than they can say.―Daily Mirror\nA brilliant 21st-century take on the Gothic: a woman, whose husband just vanishes, is left to the frantic silence of abandonment and virtual reality's eerie twilight. A seriously gifted writer surely due a big prize.―Irish Times\nA brilliant 21st-century take on the Gothic: a woman, whose husband just vanishes, is left to the frantic silence of abandonment and virtual reality's eerie twilight. A seriously gifted writer surely due a big prize.―Irish Times\nRaw, darkly comic and moving―Best\nRaw, darkly comic and moving―Best\nStunning . . . Ghosted is a séance disguised as a novel.―The London Magazine\nStunning . . . Ghosted is a séance disguised as a novel.―The London Magazine\nAshworth's writing is often referred to as "unnerving" and I wonder if that's because of her immense talent for honing in on our deepest fears.―Northern Soul\nAshworth's writing is

Tracing the dark possibilities of best intentions gone awry, this darkly comic novel about a dysfunctional young woman’s life in the suburbs offers interesting psychological insights. Anniemorbidly obese and lonelymoves into a new home hoping for a clean slate but is convinced she has seen her next-door neighbor before. She embarks on a series of increasingly bizarre attempts to ingratiate herself with the boy next door, but wrong turns and snap judgments lead to a compelling and bloody climax.

Bliss Books

Seaside Special - Postcards from the Edge

Short Stories & Anthologies

Bluemoose Books

Notes Made While Falling (Goldsmiths Press)

A genre-bending meditation on sickness, spirituality, creativity, and the redemptive powers of writing.
Notes Made While Falling is both a genre-bending memoir and a cultural study of traumatized and sickened selves in fiction and film. It offers a fresh, visceral, and idiosyncratic perspective on creativity, spirituality, illness, and the limits of fiction itself. At its heart is a story of a disastrously traumatic childbirth, its long aftermath, and the out-of-time roots of both trauma and creativity in an extraordinary childhood. 
Moving from fairgrounds to Agatha Christie, from literary festivals to neuroscience and the Bible, from Chernobyl to King Lear, Ashworth takes us on a fantastic journey through familiar landscapes transformed through unexpected encounters and comic combinations. The everyday provides the ground for the macabre and the absurd, as the narration twists and stretches time. Hovering on the edge of madness, writing, it seems, might keep us sane―or might just allow us to keep on living. 
In Notes Made While Falling, Ashworth calls for a redefinition of the creative work of thinking, writing, teaching, and being, and she underlines the necessity of a fearlessly compassionate and empathic attention to vulnerability and fragility.

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Goldsmiths Press

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Books by Ashworth, Jenn