Notes from a Regicide

Winner of the Nautilus Silver Award!
Named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly and Amazon!
A Finalist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize!
A Finalist for the Locus Award!
A Finalist for the Octavia E. Butler Award!
A Finalist for the Otherwise Award!

“Few capture the grubbiness of intimacy ― and the starchy scent of home ― as well as Fellman does in his depiction of his characters’ trans family. Magnificent, heartbreaking.” ―Charlie Jane Anders for The Washington Post

“An all-too-timely tale of trans rights and loss.” ―People Magazine

Notes from a Regicide is a heartbreaking science-fiction story of trans self-discovery from award-winning author Isaac Fellman.

When your parents die, you find out who they really were.

Griffon Keming’s second parents saved him from his abusive family. They taught him how to be trans, paid for his transition, and tried to love him as best they could. But Griffon’s new parents had troubles of their own – both were deeply scarred by the lives they lived before Griffon, the struggles they faced to become themselves, and the failed revolution that drove them from their homeland. When they died, they left an unfillable hole in his heart.

Griffon’s best clue to his parents’ lives is in his father’s journal, written from a jail cell while he awaited execution. Stained with blood, grief, and tears, these pages struggle to contain the love story of two artists on fire. With the journal in hand, Griffon hopes to pin down his relationship to these wonderful and strange people for whom time always seemed to be running out.

In Notes from a Regicide, a trans family saga set in a far-off, familiar future, Isaac Fellman goes beyond the concept of found family to examine how deeply we can be healed and hurt by those we choose to love.