The Sourdough Compendium

Award-winning stories from the world of All the Murmuring Bones and The Briar Book of the Dead: This compendium gathers fantastical tales from the dark, gothic heart of the Sourdough universe. Witches, assassins, and pirates are wrapped in dense, eerie, and magical prose.

Included are three collections – Sourdough and Other Stories, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, and The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales – whose mosaic narratives form much of the foundational mythology for the novels All the Murmuring Bones, The Path of Thorns, The Briar Book of the Dead, The Crimson Road, and A Forest, Darkly.

• Coffin-makers struggle to keep the dead buried—and to rein in their own murderous impulses.
• Poison girls are trained in the art of marital assassination.
• Books carry stories and forbidden secrets forward.
• A young witch takes terrible revenge on a former lover.
• The Little Sisters of St. Florian devote their lives to knowledge—good and evil alike.
• A dying forest god is revived.
• Mermaids and seamstresses forge dangerous alliances; changelings sow chaos.
• Saints slumber, deer-girls dance, bears reveal their true nature, and the fate of the upper and lower worlds rests on the whims of a shifting Plague Maid.

Refined, haunting, and populated with unforgettable figures, these stories weave together into a fairytale-gothic fabric of rare beauty and danger. All three collections were shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award; The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings won the prize.