It matters not who you are born to but where you are made.
It is 1597 and Kit Skevy and Mariner Elgin have just robbed the wrong grave.
The two are unusual criminals in the pocket of a gang Lord named Will Twentyman, the Grave Eorl of Southwark. Mariner is the best cutpurse around, a strange Calvinist girl who dresses like a boy and is partner in crime to Kit Skevy, Southwark’s best brawler who carries a secret: he cannot feel pain.
When caught out in their unfortunate larceny, Kit is kidnapped by the threatening alchemist Lord Isherwood (a man who will stop at nothing to achieve his hopes for the Red Lion elixir) and his studious son, Lazarus Isherwood, with whom Kit develops a complicated intrigue. When Mariner enlists the help of a competing French alchemist, Lady Elody Blackwater, Mariner and Kit are thrust into the shadowed, political world of Tudor alchemy.
The quick and the dead coming January 2025
I am so excited to share with you all my upcoming novel. The Quick and the Dead has been a real labour of love, a dive into my abiding love for Tudor history and my continued exploration of the fluidity of Queer history and historical gender representation.
– Emma Hinds.
In writing this book, I had so many questions about this astonishing period of history when monarchs rose and fell, a butcher’s boy could bring down the established church, poets could change the world and the sun became the centre of the universe. In a time of such turmoil and contradictions, when a young person could go to bed not knowing what religion they would wake up in, I pondered upon the question: what does it mean to believe in alchemy? Kit Skevy and Mariner Elgin were born and this is their journey.
Emma Hinds 
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