From Out My Heart is a darkly sensuous novel about two women whose bodies become the threshold through which the living and the dead insist on speaking, from the award-winning author of Follow Me to Ground and Redder Days.   

When Phyllipa, a scholar chasing the lingering pulse of Edgar Allan Poe, travels to a remote, river‑ruled community, she finds herself drawn into the orbit of Lana: a woman whose faith, exhaustion, and old wounds make her strangely open to visitation. Their encounters unfold in a landscape of heatstorms, thickets, and swollen riverlight, where possession is not a metaphor but a physical event: a tremor in the voice, a shift in the hips, a borrowed breath. As Phyllipa records Lana's transformations, she feels her own interior loosening – the boundaries between scholarship and desire, between inquiry and complicity, dissolving into the wet dark of the woods.   

Rainsford crafts a gothic of flesh and inheritance, where motherhood, harm, and spectral longing press against the skin. A novel of haunting in its truest sense: the way another life can move through a woman's body, and the way a woman can become the echo chamber for what history refuses to release.



Sue Rainsford is an Irish fiction and art writer based in Dublin. Her debut novel, Follow Me To Ground, was originally published by New Island Books in Ireland (2018), in the UK by Doubleday (2019), and by Scribner in the US (2021). Her second novel, Redder Days, was published by Doubleday in Ireland and the UK (2021). Her stories and novels have been nominated for the Republic of Consciousness Award, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Prix Jean Monnet des Jeunes Européens, the New York Radio Festival Awards, the Desperate Literature Prize for Short Fiction, and have received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly.



'Rainsford is such a distinctive voice in Irish literature, with a particular talent for mixing the ordinary and the uncanny, for creating a certain ferocity of atmosphere, and cutting to the quick of human nature. FOMH is complex and captivating and darkly beautiful.'



'This dark, unnerving exploration of violence against women, and the plurality of hauntings of women's bodies, is endlessly propulsive, thudding along like a runaway heart.'



'A beguilingly gothic sucker punch of a read. Couched in Rainsford's characteristic lyrical prose, there's a dreamlike quality to this novel. It feels familiar and also arrestingly fresh. From Out My Heart is like nothing else I've ever read. You're bound to fall under its spell.'



Compulsive, intriguing, and disturbing; the combination of earthiness with such a briskly intelligent voice is irresistible. Sue is a master of her specific and original vision. I cannot express how deeply impressed I am by this novel.