THE EVERRUMBLE
a small novel in small forms
the everrumble is a poetic imagining of intense focus and sweeping ideas.
‘stunningly original’
‘small-but-enormous’
‘a tour de force’
‘luminous’
‘the best book I’ve read in a decade’
‘a loving homage to our beleaguered planet’
Cover art by Ethiopian artist Eyayu Genet. More of the artist’s work can be found here.
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Longlisted in The Guardian‘s Not-The-Booker Prize and featured in Verb Festival (Wellington)’s digital programme
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About the book:
Zettie’s story is fluid and in motion, transcending geographies and time. She stops talking, at age seven, and starts to listen – to the worlds she finds in language and books, and to the people and places she encounters as she moves across continents. Her silence connects her to people, to nature and to the elemental world. Magical and beyond boundaries, this collection focuses on small fragments, taking Zettie, and the reader, inevitably to the place where human history began.
the everrumble can be purchased directly from the publisher here.
Also available at Nationwide Books, NZ / Amazon/ in a book shop near you!
©everrumble
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What people are saying:
“A tour de force, Michelle Elvy’s the everrumble is a profound, poetic constellation of notes on the Earth’s ‘alive noises’, the hope that lives in the natural world. Zettie’s story – all her moments of evolving, her capacity to listen, and her gift of becoming all the sounds of the earth – affected me to the core.”
– Christopher Allen, author of Other Household Toxins; editor of SmokeLong Quarterly
“Michelle Elvy’s acute prose wraps her silent heroine in ‘layers of remembered sound’, each linked fiction transmitting a luminous sense of the ‘loud world’ which vibrates her nerve-endings, and tracing her course through a life alert to strange frequencies of experience. the everrumble is a story of listening which makes sound ‘touch down’ under our scalps, taking our senses on a journey of ‘orchestral movement’.”
– Tracey Slaughter, author of deleted scenes for lovers, 2014 Bridport Prize winner
“Michelle Elvy’s the everrumble is an infused and accomplished accumulation of being. The language dances through the reader, elucidating concepts of time and sound and place. In Zettie, acutely conveyed, Elvy gives us a loving homage to our beleaguered planet.”
– Catherine McNamara, author of The Cartography of Others
“With a keen poetic sensibility, the everrumble draws the reader into worlds woven with fluidity through time and place. Here is a stunningly original novella crackling with an inner and outer expansive life. These linked stories are rife with an elegant gravitas and a unique approach to what is possible once those doors of perception are swung open and one can see, hear, and feel what awaits on the other side.”
– Robert Scotellaro, author of Nothing is Ever One Thing and What We Know So Far; editor of New Micro
“What do you hear when you choose to stop speaking? In this glorious and small-but-enormous book, we meet Zettie, born into a cacophonous world with a talent for perceiving sounds too quiet, too far and too deep for the rest of us – including the everrumble. Elvy paints a dreamy, powerful portrait of the life and travels of this word-collector and thinker who becomes celebrated as a visionary, not for seeing but listening. the everrumble will leave you filled with questions about what we miss by not paying attention, by filling up the silences.”
– Tania Hershman, author of Some Of Us Glow More Than Others
“…this is the best book I’ve read in a decade; a constellation of words from all over the world and a celebration of our planet’s energy and vibration. It’s short, just 103 pages, but it’s exactly right. The prose is exquisite, the observations both human and linked to all things, and the cacophony is wondrous yet familiar. A timeless world-song that unites what’s deep within us with the furthest horizon.”
– T M Upchurch, recently appearing in Best Microfictions 2019
The everrumble is the pulse of being itself, the sheer thrum of reality portrayed here as a mystical underpinning of everything alive.
– Vaughan Rapatahana, author of the novel Novel, Poems from the Edge of Extinction and winner of the inaugural Proverse Poetry Prize 2016
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Reviews and Interviews:
Interview with Nancy Stohlman, January 2020
Interview at takahē, August 2019
Book launch:
The author at the book launch, Bristol, Jun 2019
The book was presented on National Flash Fiction Day in New Zealand, with readings in Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin, Northland, Wellington and Waikato.
It was officially launched by the publisher, Ad Hoc Fiction, in Bristol, England on 29 June 2019.
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Readings:
New York City, Aug 02 / Baltimore, Aug 13 / Annapolis, Aug 20 / Rehoboth Beach, DE, Sept 06 / Old Fox Books, Annapolis, September 13
In New Zealand, the book appeared at the 2019 NorthWrite Festival and was also featured in Verb Festival (Wellington)‘s digital programme.
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Where to find it:
Internationally: The publisher’s website / Amazon Kindle
In New Zealand: Nationwide Books
For reviews, please contact the publisher (helpdesk [at] adhocfiction [dot] com) or add your note to Goodreads.
- 196mm x 134mm; 132pp
- ISBN: 978-1-912095-73-5
- Published by: Ad Hoc Fiction
MICHELLE ELVY 
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