Burn it All Down

Karen Jones is a flash and short fiction writer from Glasgow, Scotland. Her flashes have been nominated for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize, and her story "Small Mercies" is included in Best Small Fictions 2019. She has won first prize in the Cambridge Flash Prize, Flash 500 and Reflex Fiction and second prize in Fractured Lit's Micro Fiction Competition. Her work has been Highly Commended or shortlisted for To Hull and Back, Bath Flash Fiction and Bath Short Story Award and many others. Her novella-in-flash When It's Not Called Making Love is published by Ad Hoc Fiction. She is an editor for National Flash Fiction Day anthology.

Burn it All Down, a novella inspired by the wild and richly metaphorical paintings of Andrea Kowch, shows the plight of Beth, a desperately lonely woman, trapped in an isolated rural location, who creates a fantasy world it is hard to escape from. In vivid prose, as extraordinary as Kowch's paintings, Karen Jones describes a situation universal to women the world over, in the past and present, who, through poverty and oppression, teeter on the edge of survival, mentally and physically. Beth finds solace in her sisters and her animals-chickens, cows, even bees-whose lives mingle closely with hers. Her husband, whom she scarcely knows, is lost at sea, the ocean his true love. It is a hallmark of excellent writing that a reader becomes invested in a character's life. I longed for Beth to be set free and by the end of the story, it is heart-warming to believe she finds love and a way to a better future.

-Jude Higgins, author of The Chemist's House, V.Press

Evocative and haunting, Burn It All Down is a dark, edgy fairytale. In a riotous house, surrounded by memories, her free-spirited sisters and a menagerie of creatures, Beth waits for her husband's return. Karen Jones's prose soars, swoops and loops, circling back like the ever-present crows in this extraordinary novella-in-flash. This is a writer at the top of her game.

-Damhnait Monaghan, author of New Girl in Little Cove

The novella-in-flash is by its nature a liminal form, but that is a gift in the assured writing of Karen Jones, who uses the darkly mysterious paintings of American artist Andrea Kowch as a springboard for a compelling tale, infused with yearning, melancholy, and flashes of wry humour. This book may be small but is in no way slight. It is its own world and an insightful meditation on sisterhood and a woman's quest for freedom, while trapped in an indifferent patriarchal society.

-KM Elkes, author of All That Is Between Us