S8E9 Scorched Grace: Margot Douaihy on the hardboiled genre and a queer, heavily tattooed nun

“I wanted to start with a very unstable, shaky foundation in order to create a world of voltage and heat and fire. Each book in the series is its own little storm.”

The hardboiled genre has received a complete makeover. Holiday is a queer, chain-smoking, heavily tattooed nun, covered completely in her nun’s habit. And her amateur sleuthing skills are taking the literary world by storm.

Scorched Grace is the first of a brand new series of books from Margot Douaihy. In the novel, Holiday attempts to uncover the mystery behind a shocking arson attack at Saint Sebastian's School. This poetic novel deals with religion, humanity, conflict, identity, eroticism and much more.

In this episode, you will learn:

• How messy characters can be very healing and reparative to a reader.
• Why you shouldn’t shy away from including eroticism in your books.
• That there’s always room to refine and reinvent well-loved genres.

Find out more about Margot here.

Your host is inkjockey founder Mark Heywood.

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You can view the full transcript here.

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