Mouth of the Lion by Lily Richards Fiction · Paperback · 224 pages ISBN 1-934081-00-0 · Publisher Direct Price: $10.00/£7.99 Click on cover image to see full-size version

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Family Values for the 21st Century

The narrator of Mouth of the Lion is James Sheahan, an occasional writer and steady drug user driven by equal parts ritual, atheism, and Catholic guilt. James hasn't talked to his youngest brother Micky in years, and his exchanges with his oldest brother Patrick are shouted across transcontinental phone lines, but he does care for his middle brother Luka, who is camped out on the living room floor together with a vagrant teenager. Until now, James' problems have revolved around a dealer eight hours late for an appointment and a girlfriend he despises, but things are about to come apart at the seams. As spring turns to summer, Luka embarks on a quest to drag old skeletons out of the family closet and James has to confront secrets and lies: his family's and his own.

Mouth of the Lion is a novel about the ties that bind and two brothers' obsession with changing the immutable.

Click here to read the first chapter of Mouth of the Lion.

Click here to read a review of Mouth of the Lion at Small Press Reviews.

Click here to read a review of Mouth of the Lion at the Uniquely Pleasurable website.

Photo by Patryce Bak

Lily Richards has been writing fiction in various professional capacities for many years, including a stint as the illustrator and writer of user manuals for medical testing equipment, a year as the webmaster of a politician's website, and several semesters as a high school art teacher. Richards was born in the United States and spent most of her childhood and adolescence living in various central and southern European countries with the occasional pit stop back stateside. After several years in England, she moved to Berkeley, California, in 1997. In 2004, work brought her to Sacramento, California, where the houses are big enough to accommodate several thousand books and the neighbors view the blue-haired roommate with great suspicion. Mouth of the Lion is Richards' first novel, though rumor has it that in an attic somewhere in Europe, several of her early novels and short stories, some written in German, are carefully preserved for blackmail collateral in case she should ever attempt to write a family history.