AGNES, MURDERESS, by acclaimed cartoonist Sarah Leavitt, is out tomorrow from Freehand Books. CBC has already listed it as one of 15 Canadian comics to watch for this fall!
Agnes, Murderess is a graphic novel inspired by the bloody legend of Agnes McVee, a roadhouse owner, madam and serial killer in the Cariboo region of British Columbia in the late nineteenth century. Fascinated by this legend—which originated in a 1970s guide to buried treasure in BC, and has never been verified—Sarah Leavitt has imagined an entirely new story for the mysterious Agnes: her immigration to Canada from an isolated Scottish Island; her complex entanglement with shiny things; and her terrifying grandmother, Gormul, who haunts Agnes’s dreams and waking life.
Leavitt puts a decidedly queer twist on the story, moving from women’s passionate friendships in the gardens of St John’s Wood to female relationships in the Canadian wild. At the same time, the book grapples with the dangerous pre-conceived notions held by settlers that the country was a “new world,” free of ghosts and history. Agnes, Murderess presents a tortured, complicated woman struggling to escape her past. It is a spine-chilling tale of ghosts and murder, friendship and betrayal, love and greed, fate and choice.
Sarah Leavitt is the author of the graphic memoir Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me, published in Canada, the US, UK, Germany, France, and Korea to international critical acclaim. It was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize in 2010 and is currently in development as a feature-length animation. Sarah has developed and taught comics classes for the UBC Creative Writing Program since 2012, at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
You can find Sarah reading from AGNESS, MURDERESS at the following events this Fall:
September 26: Vancouver launch
October 6: Victoria Festival of Authors
October 17 + 19: The Imaginairium at Calgary Wordfest
October 26: Vancouver Writers Festival