Hero: A fierce and captivating literary love story for 2025

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Description

HERO is a captivating literary debut and a love story for our times: a novel that exposes the precious things women give up in order to be loved, and in order to be free.

She's a waitress. He's a chef. They used to be best friends, but now, they're in love and living together in a studio apartment. She's also a selkie, Odysseus, and a cowgirl called Quick Fingers. He's a really good man.

When he asks her to marry him, Hero panics. She is lots of things but one thing she doesn't want to be is anybody's wife.

Drawing on a rich history of myth and legend, and yet unmistakeably of the moment, HERO is a love story and a story about what it means for women to be supporting characters in a world written by men. How can you be yourself when you are a product of other people's imaginations How can you love another person and be free

Reviews

A lyrical exploration of the love we deserve but rarely receive. Buckley's writing is alchemical, transforming myth into truth and pain into hope -- Amy Twigg, author of Spoilt Creatures
This bold, clever novel sharply dissects gender, power, desire and control. Tender and acerbic, 'Hero' recognises the sacrifices women must make to be the authors of our own narratives. Buckley unsettles the reader's gaze in her excavation of myth-making, asking how we might construct our own legends from the wreckage of our patriarchal history. -- Jessica Andrews, author of Saltwater and Milk Teeth

Author Bio

Katie Buckley was born in Fowey, Cornwall, and grew up in Canada and the UK. She studied in Edinburgh, and is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at Royal Holloway, where she was a Principal's Masters Scholar, and was a 2021/ 2022 London Library Emerging Writer.