BLACK MOON

by Stephen Wright ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 20, 2026 At 80, Wright has the imaginative energy of a randy teenager channeling the vocabulary of Rabelais and Melville. A life of adventure, romance, and mayhem inspired by the 18th-century Irish pirate Anne Bonny. Very little is known about Bonny’s life, and Wright has filled that blank canvas edge to edge with a saga as wild, lusty, and bloody as any pirate could want, written in maximalist prose combining Old World, nautical, and invented idioms into sentences of befuddling enchantment. His version of the character is named Amethyst Connell, called Meeks, raised by a widowed father she calls Mr Connell until his sudden death thankfully puts an end to the nightly “tuck-in kiss” she endures throughout her early years. Next stop, Miss Haywood’s Hall for Friends of Females, where Meeks has more pleasant bedroom experiences with her best friend, Ash; where she later inaugurates a long career of bladework by stabbing the headmistress with scissors; and where she’s deemed a “cloven colleen” and sent to Mrs Grainne’s “sewing shop for recalcitrant maids.” There she quickly becomes involved in a regular threesome with indistinguishable twin brother...