Patron Saints of Roadkill
A ghost moves into a woman’s apartment and begins to cough up teeth. A town keeps building as the sea prepares to take it back. A daughter inherits hunger like an heirloom.
In this collection of short stories set along a shifting coastline, the boundaries between body and memory, human and nonhuman, landscape and ocean begin to slip and strain. Houses tilt, animals and ghosts press in, and what is carried – grief, desire, damage – refuses to stay contained.
Patron Saints of Roadkill is a darkly tender collection, revealing a world where the familiar is made strange and the strange is given its rightful place in the landscape of things.
'Hauntingly beautiful, beautifully haunted'
'Hauntingly beautiful, beautifully haunted'
About Susanna
Susanna Elliffe is a fiction writer based in Ōamaru, New Zealand.
Her debut collection, Patron Saints of Roadkill, won the 2025 Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize and was published in 2026.
She writes experimental fiction, strange stories and literary landscapes, with a particular interest in the places where language and the natural world collide.