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Woodworm

Layla Martinez author Annie McDermott translator Sophie Hughes translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

Publishing:7th May '26

£9.99

This title is due to be published on 7th May, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

This paperback is available in another edition too:

Woodworm cover

‘Tense, chilling’ MARIANA ENRIQUEZ, author of Our Share of Night

'Lays bare intergenerational horror, feminine rage and the taking back of power' STYLIST

'Incredible' FINANCIAL TIMES

The house breathes.


The house contains bodies and secrets.

The house is visited by ghosts, by angels that line the roof like insects, and by saints that burn the bedsheets with their haloes.

It was built by a small-time hustler as a means of controlling his wife, and even after so many years, their daughter and her granddaughter can’t leave.

They may be witches or they may just be angry, but when the mysterious disappearance of a young boy draws unwanted attention, the two isolated women, already subjects of public scorn, combine forces with the spirits that haunt them in pursuit of something that resembles justice.

Layla Martínez’s eerie debut novel Woodworm is class-conscious horror that drags generations of monsters into the sun.

Translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott

**Readers love Woodworm**

‘It draws you in and slams the door behind you’
‘A monstrous debut’
‘I want to read this book again and again’
‘Biting and inventive’
‘Shirley Jackson by way of Lina Wolff’
‘Deeply, and wonderfully, unsettling’
‘Evokes horrific imagery with a poetic, gnashing tongue’
‘Extraordinary!’

An incredible reinvention of the haunted house as a place marked by history’s ghosts. * Financial Times *
This supernatural story of an outcast girl and her grandmother lays bare intergenerational horror, feminine rage and the taking back of power. * Stylist *
Wonderfully bizarre and ceaselessly creepy... filled with strangeness, and delivered with sharp and fast prose. Through it all, Martínez explores larger topics of class resentment and the lingering effects of evil. Intergenerational trauma and monsters share the spotlight in this terrific debut. * New York Times *
A claustrophobic slice of domestic horror… With impressive economy and hurtling intensity,Woodworm emits a howl of fury against entrenched inequality and enforced servitude, and the constraints they place on working-class women * Times Literary Supplement *
A house of women and shadows, built from poetry and revenge. Layla Martínez’s tense, chilling novel tells a story of specters, class war, violence and loneliness, as naturally as if the witches had dictated this lucid, terrible nightmare to Martínez themselves. -- Mariana Enriquez, author of OUR SHARE OF THE NIGHT

ISBN: 9781529932546

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

192 pages