Fruit of the Dead – Lyon Rachel (2024)

This contemporary reimagining of the myth of Persephone and Demeter unfolds over one summer on a lush private island and examines who holds power in a modern underworld. Eighteen-year-old camp counsellor Cory Ansel is aimless and reluctant to face her high-strung single mother in New York. When the father of one of her campers offers her an alternative, she accepts a childcare job on his private island off the coast of Maine. Rolo Picazo, a middle-aged, divorced CEO of a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, is magnetic and intoxicated by Cory, but the job also comes with a non-disclosure agreement. Surrounded by luxury and opiates manufactured by his company, Cory continues to tell herself that she is in control. Her mother, Emer, who heads a struggling agricultural NGO, senses that something is wrong. When her daughter seemingly disappears, Emer crosses land and sea to answer a cry for help that only she believes she can hear. Told through the alternating perspectives of the two women, this lush and haunting story explores love, attraction, control, obliteration and America’s late-capitalist mythology, while tracing the savage complexity of the mother-daughter bond.