Zoe Maeve Books

The Shining meets Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette in this gripping debut from an award-winning talent.The Gift opens on the snow-blanketed grounds of the Alexander Palace in Western Russia where a moth has come to attend the birth of the fourth Romanov princess, Anastasia. She and her siblings grow up in a gilded world, isolated from the society beyond the palace walls despite their dominion over it. After mysteriously receiving a camera on her fifteenth birthday, she begins to document her world, but the gift carries with it a weight she can’t yet see. A creature moves on the edge of her vision and stalks her dreams. As the revolution unfolds, the confines of Anastasia’s world keep closing in. Something is following her, and it might not be human.

As dusk falls over the lake, Lina’s world is beginning to dissolveIt’s a typically sticky Toronto summer and Lina’s spending her first couple of weeks after graduation reading and hanging out with her best friend Cara. Everything’s calm—until she finds out that her childhood friend Alicia has died.With her high school friends quickly drifting apart and her parents out of town, Lina tries to make sense of what has happened on her own. Hoping for answers, she turns to Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt. As Lina reunites with her friends for a final party on the shores of Lake Ontario, she finds herself wondering what it means to have known someone, and who they’ll all become when they’re no longer anchored to each other.Winner of the Expozine Awards, July Underwater is an early work of Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) based artist Zoe Maeve, now available to widespread audiences for the first time.