From Out My Heart

by Sue Rainsford

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.

189 pages, Paperback

Published October 8, 2026

About the author

Sue Rainsford is a fiction and arts writer based in Dublin. A graduate of Trinity College, she completed her MFA in writing and literature at Bennington College, Vermont. She is a recipient of the VAI/DCC Critical Writing Award, the Arts Council Literature Bursary Award, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. When it was first published, Follow Me to Ground won the Kate O’Brien Award and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Award and the Republic of Consciousness Award.

source: Amazon

Reviews

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“It’s in their nature. The dead return.” I’m a big fan of Sue Rainsford, whose first two novels were strange, inventive entries into the pantheon of gothic horror; my expectations were set sky-high for her upcoming third novel, From Out My Heart, and of course they were met (and smashed with a sledgehammer). 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. This is in no small part to Rainsford’s prose, often spare and serving the plot and tone dutifully; the structure and the conceit lend themselves well to her style, too. Phyl is a scholar of Edgar Allan Poe, who learns of a woman named Lana, living in an obscure religious sect in the middle of nowhere, who claims to channel the ghost of Virginia Clemm, Poe’s cousin (who, aged just 13, was married to the 27 year old writer). Phyl, taking a week away from her husband and young son, and still reeling from a dark tragedy involving her brother Dylan, goes to meet Lana and investigate this potential possession. The deeper she gets in her questions, the more enmeshed in Lana’s world and marriage, the more her own life starts to unravel, forcing her to confront the awfulness she has been hiding from. This is a novel that does not ever move in the direction you expect it to, and like so many of my favourite novels lately is one that is more concerned with questions than answers. I read it in two engrossed sittings, late at night, though could’ve happily read it in one swoop. It asks us to consider our lives, to look fully in the face of that which we would not confront: to name our demons and ask for freedom. Each night after reading I went to bed and thought, drifting off, that I could hear something under the floor, something pulsing. From Out My Heart is out in October, but its spectre will follow me long beyond that. Thanks to Liam at the Lilliput Press for my proof copy!

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rainsford balances the brutality of existing in the world as woman, alongside the softness of our creatures. There were times I had to put this book down and catch my breath, Sue captures grief and denial so perfectly. This book hit nerves of mine I didn’t know anyone else could see. Put words on the indescribable confusion, the desperate denial of a loved one’s horrific actions.
If themes of sexual violence are triggering for you, please take care of yourself when reading this book, but read it nonetheless. Let her voice be heard.