ORPHEUS BUILDS A GIRL

A compelling and provocatively disturbing read - based on a true story.

Based on a chilling true story, the novel explores toxic masculinity, self-delusion, white privilege and the hyper-sexualisation of Latin American women. It is a compelling - and provocatively disturbing - read, which won the Laxfield Literary Launch Prize for unpublished manuscripts in 2021. The deal was announced in The Bookseller.
Wilhelm von Tore is dying. As he looks back on his life he reflects on his upbringing in Dresden, his beloved grandmother and his medical career during the second world war. But mostly he remembers his darling Luci, the great love of his life, his dark-haired beauty promised to him in a dream years before they met.

Though only together for a few months in her first life, their love is written in the stars. Using scientific research compiled over decades, Wilhelm ensures that, for him and his beloved, death is only the beginning.

But through the cracks in Wilhem's story there is another voice, that of Gabriela, and she will not let this version of events go unchallenged. She tells the story of her sister Luciana, fearless and full of life, and the madman who robbed her from her grave.


Heather Parry is a writer, editor, event chair, podcast host, ghostwriter and co-publisher of Extra Teeth, a design-focused print magazine showcasing the best new writing from Scotland and beyond. Her short stories and non-fiction have appeared internationally in numerous magazines and books, as part of art exhibitions and, once, as a gigantic book for festival-goers to shelter under. Her fiction explores self-deception, transformation, the grotesque and the body, and her non-fiction work is primarily concerned with power and politics. Originally from Rotherham, South Yorkshire, she now lives and works in Glasgow. Heather won the 2016 Bridge Award for an Emerging Writer, and the Laxfield Literary Launch Prize for her unpublished manuscript, ORPHEUS BUILDS A GIRL. She is a 2021 Hawthornden Fellow.