Bram Stoker Award. James Tiptree Jr. Award. Finalist for the Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy Award, Mythopoetic Award, Shirley Jackson Award and British Fantasy Award. A complex and gripping novel about the struggles of a young artist with schizophrenia. distinguish reality from psychosis... and an intriguing encounter with a ghostly woman. Artist India Morgan Phelps, known simply as Imp to her friends, tries to tell the story of her life, but she has to struggle with the insecurities of her own mind. Suffering from schizophrenia, which is accompanied by anxiety and OCD, Imp has great difficulty separating fantasy from reality. But it is important for her to tell her “truth.” And she sets sail along the stream of her own consciousness, remembering both her obsession and the mysterious woman with whom collided on the side of the road. Imp must overcome or work through her mental illness to piece together her memories and tell her story. Through an in-depth exploration of mental illness and the creative process, The Drowned Woman tells the eerie and poignant story of a girl's quest to uncover the truth locked inside her head. “Poignant, beautiful and perfectly constructed, like a box of secrets, The Drowned Woman takes your breath away.” – Holly Black “This is a masterpiece. He deserves to be read, regardless of genre, for a long, long time.” – Elizabeth Beer “A superbly written, strikingly original novel that includes references to classics by authors such as Shirley Jackson, H. P. Lovecraft and Peter Straub, brings Caitlin R. Kiernan to the forefront of the masters of modern dark fiction. This is a haunting and unforgettable story with a narrator whose voice will resonate in your head long after midnight." —Elizabeth Hand “With this novel, Caitlin R. Kiernan firmly enters the new, still emerging vanguard of the most accomplished writers of Gothic and fantasy, capable of creating prose with deep moral and artistic seriousness. This subtle, dark, twisted work, with a strange, haunting genius shining through, is unlike anything I've ever read before. "The Drowned Woman is a stunning piece of literature and, to be frank, a true masterpiece of the author." – Peter Straub “Caitlin R. Kiernan turns the ghost story inside out and transforms her. This is a story about how stories are told, what they reveal and what they don't reveal, but that doesn't make it any less tense or exciting. This is a novel about real and imagined nightmares that quickly pulls you into the deepest depths and then very slowly allows you to emerge for a breath of air.” — Brian Evenson “A novel that combines all the elements of Caitlin R. Kiernan's prose that her reader has come to expect: a surprising brilliance of style, an atmosphere of languid melancholy, and an inexplicable mixture of harrowing beauty and chilling horror. It's a ghost story, but it's also a book about how ghost stories are written. A discussion about the nature of falling in love, disappointment in love and reflections on whether madness is a gift or a curse. One of those very few novels reading which you want to never end.” – S. T. Joshi “Kiernan pins the traditional memoir on his workbench and completely reshapes it into something completely different, yet still painfully familiar—more alien, more complex, more beautiful and more truthful.” – Catherine M. Valente “I admire the author and her ability to weave sentences into an elegant web of text. By the end of this novel, you will no longer be sure where the boundaries lie between dreams and reality, the ghostly and the physical, madness and sanity. – Benjamin Piercy “Kiernan is a cartographer of lost worlds. She writes about thresholds, those harsh spaces between two realities that she herself experiences and which she has to cross, if not overcome.” – The New York Times“Discover Shirley Jackson postmodernism, the result might look a little like a Caitlin R. Kiernan novel. Intense, multi-layered, sinister, funny and frightening at the same time, the novel takes readers into the abyss of hallucinations full of desires and secrets, told through the voice of one India Morgan Phelps, one of the most compelling and unreliable narrators I have ever encountered. A wild and strange journey awaits those who open this book.” – Deng Haon