Two women, a century apart, and an album of the beautiful dead.

An album of Victorian death photography passes down the years and snares two women who never meet. That is the engine of All Her Beautiful Deaths, the second adult gothic from A. Rushby, out now from Verve Books. Split between 1865 London and the present day, it follows a maid drawn into the secrets of a house that photographs its dead, and a grieving modern artist offered a fortune to make an inconvenient truth disappear. Rushby turns the real Victorian practice of memorial photography into a story about grief, art and ownership.

All Her Beautiful Deaths | A. Rushby | Verve Books | 1 September 2026 |

All Her Beautiful Deaths by A. Rushby: A Gothic Built on Victorian Death Photography

There was a brief window in the nineteenth century when the only likeness a poor family would ever own of a child was the one taken after the child had died. Photography cost money, life was cheap, and so the camera got saved for the moment that mattered most, which turned out, with grim regularity, to be the last one. Memorial photography, they called it. Prop the body upright, steady the head, and let the long exposure do the work the living could no longer do. A. Rushby has built a whole novel on that small, unbearable practice, and All Her Beautiful Deaths is stronger for refusing to flinch from it.

Two women, roughly a century and a half apart, are bound together by an album of these photographs. In 1865, Minnie takes a post as maid at Culpepper House, less out of ambition than desperation, with an ill twin sister called Molly to keep alive. The Culpepper twins are the sort of employers who come with a warning attached.

Edmund runs a laboratory out of the house and peddles something called the Culpepper Cure. Edith runs about with glass plates, photographing the dead, and doing it with a devotion that unsettles everyone but her. Minnie thinks the work is ghoulish. Then she starts to feel something for Edith that Victorian society had no intention of permitting, and the ghoulishness becomes the least of her worries.

In the present day, an artist called Hadley Allard inherits that same album, and with it a swan. The photograph at the centre of the book shows a dead girl holding a dead swan, and it is the image everyone in the novel orbits. Hadley is grieving, badly, having lost her mother and a close friend in quick succession, when her abusive ex steals one of her Victorian photographs and turns it into an art-world spectacle.

She fights back in public, which is how she comes to the attention of Kit Culpepper, keeper of the Culpepper Trust and holder of a chequebook large enough to make the whole thing disappear. He wants the album. He very much does not want her asking why.

That is a lot of book, and Rushby keeps most of the plates spinning. The great pleasure of the thing is structural. She cross-cuts between the two timelines with the timing of someone who has watched a lot of good television, snapping from present to past at exactly the moment a revelation is about to land, so that Minnie’s chapters keep arriving a beat late to explain what Hadley has only just begun to suspect.

The past does not merely precede the present here. It answers it, slightly out of sync, like an echo you hear after you have already worked out the shape of the shout. When it works, and it works often, you get that lovely vertigo of two stories reaching for the same truth from opposite ends of a hundred and fifty years.

Look closely at how that cross-cutting actually behaves, and you find both the book’s cleverest trick and its one real problem. The present-day strand carries the machinery. The album, the Trust, the scandal, the will-they-won’t-they with Kit, all the levers of a mystery-thriller live in Hadley’s chapters, and machinery needs page count. The 1865 strand carries the atmosphere.

The house that seems to breathe, the conservatory, the photography, the doomed and tender thing between Minnie and Edith, all the gothic richness sits back there in the past. Which means the novel keeps cutting away from its most beautiful material in order to service its most functional.

Rushby writes with restraint, letting an image sit rather than gilding it, and the effect is cumulative rather than immediate. Reading her is like watching a print come up in the developing tray. Nothing at first, then a grey suggestion, then all at once the whole picture, and you realise the detail was there the entire time, waiting for the chemistry to catch up. It is a style that rewards the patient and frustrates the hungry, and your mileage will depend on which of those you happen to be on any given evening.

It helps that Rushby has stocked both centuries with people worth spending time among. The present day gives Hadley a chosen family, Elke and Gretchen and a sharp-tongued Charlie and the reclusive artist Artie Butterworth, a collective of women who close ranks around her rather than sell her out for a plot twist, which is rarer in this kind of book than it ought to be. The 1865 house gives her Edith and Edmund and Edmund’s William, a set of secrets stacked so that pulling one loose shifts all the others.

And the research holds the whole thing up. The photography is grounded in the real Victorian practice, credited in an author’s note that will send you down an evening of image-searching you may come to regret. Highgate Cemetery does what Highgate Cemetery always does in fiction, which is loom beautifully. There is even a wink at Schiaparelli’s lobster dress for the art-history crowd. Rushby has done the reading, and she wears it lightly, dropping a detail where it deepens a scene rather than parking it there to prove she looked it up.

Rushby knows exactly which tradition she is writing in. All Her Beautiful Deaths sits comfortably on the shelf beside Sarah Waters, whose Affinity mined Victorian spiritualism and forbidden desire from the same seam, and whose Fingersmith built its reputation on a plot that folds back on itself the way this one does. It nods to Laura Purcell’s object-haunted gothics, The Silent Companions especially, where a thing rather than a ghost does the frightening.

And in its art-world Victoriana it shares blood with Elizabeth Macneal’s The Doll Factory. What Rushby adds to that company is the photography, which is a genuinely fresh spine for a gothic, and a queerness that runs through both centuries without ever being made to feel like a lesson.

This is her second adult gothic under the A. Rushby name, after Slashed Beauties, the one about the bewitched and murderous anatomical wax models, and the development between the two is easy to trace. Slashed Beauties led with its high concept and its darkness. This one trusts its structure and its characters to do the heavy lifting, and the result is a more controlled, more emotionally ambitious book, if a slightly less lurid one. Rushby has published more than thirty titles across various names and age ranges, middle grade included, and it shows in the cleanness of the storytelling. Whatever else you make of the balance, the woman knows how to build a plot that pays off.

Underneath the mystery, the book is about ownership. Who owns an image, who owns a body, who gets to decide what a dead woman’s likeness is worth and who pockets the difference. Edith photographs the dead and calls it beauty. A modern man offers to buy that beauty and bury it. An abusive ex steals it and monetises it.

The novel keeps circling the ethics of the gaze, the way art can preserve a person and exploit them in the same gesture, and it is clever enough never to resolve that tension into a tidy answer. Set against Waters, whose Victorian women are caged by class and desire, Rushby’s are caged by the market, past and present, and the fight in both centuries is the same fight for the right to be more than an object other people trade.

The book that keeps cutting away from its best timeline is also the book that hands you two romances, a real mystery, a house with a pulse, and an ending readers keep describing as a warm hug delivered by a corpse. Rushby set out to make death photography beautiful without making it comfortable, and she managed it. If she writes a third of these, I hope she gives Minnie the room she is owed.

All Her Beautiful Deaths by A. Rushby:

London, 1865. Desperate for work, Minnie takes employment as a maid for the wealthy Culpepper twins. The siblings lead a strange and unconventional life: Edmund operates a laboratory from the house while Edith experiments with morbid photography. Drawn in by a dangerous attraction to one of the twins, and with a sick sister of her own to provide for, by the time Minnie makes a disturbing discovery it’s too late – she must stay and unravel the mysteries of Culpepper House before she becomes a victim of one of Edith’s photographs herself.

London, present day. Grieving artist Hadley is consumed by an album of Victorian death photography, including the exquisite image of a deceased young girl with a swan. When this photograph is involved in an art world scandal, Hadley is given the opportunity to create an installation surrounding the image. But the enigmatic Kit Culpepper, of the Culpepper Trust, has other plans. He offers Hadley an eye-watering sum of money to sell him the album and never speak of its contents again. As Hadley digs deeper into the album’s truths, she begins to suspect Kit Culpepper is guarding a deathly secret… and she’s not entirely sure how far he’ll go to keep it.

A gripping dual-timeline gothic mystery inspired by the macabre world of Victorian death photography, All Her Beautiful Deaths offers a powerful exploration of classism and ownership in the art world, while beautifully portraying expressions of grief and love. Perfect for fans of Fingersmith by Sarah Waters and The Burial Plot by Elizabeth Macneal, with echoes of Daphne du Maurier.

‘A deliciously gothic dual-time read that I couldn’t put down. Enter Edith Culpepper’s world and be prepared to be taken on an unexpected journey. Twists aplenty and a fascinating insight into the Victorian practice of death photography. Utterly engaging’ – JENNI KEER, author of The Ravenswood Witch

‘A macabre family mystery that weaves across the generations, All Her Beautiful Deaths is also a twist-filled love story that gets under your skin. Intrigue builds as the story pulls in the dark side of Victorian photography and the politics of today’s art world to reach an unexpectedly life-affirming denouement. An addictive read’ – CAROLYN KIRBY, author of The Conviction of Cora Burns

PRAISE FOR A. RUSHBY

‘Adored this gorgeous, sumptuously gothic feminist novel’ – EMMA COWING, author of The Show Woman

‘Utterly compelling from the first page to the final, shocking twist’ – CHRISTINE WELLS, author of The Paris Gown

‘Captivating from start to end and tells a haunting tale of feminine rage’ – ABBIE EATON, author of Dragonhart

‘Two timelines collide with imaginative verve’ – TIMES

‘Unsettling and addictive… Rushby’s storytelling translates brilliantly to the adult gothic, positioning her as a bold new voice in horror’ – SEATTLE TIMES

‘Rich, intricate, and full of surprises’ – HISTORICAL NOVEL SOCIETY

This novel contains discussions of mental health issues, domestic violence, animal cruelty and drug use.

Ginger Nuts of Horror: The Heart and Soul of Horror Reviews

Looking to get your horror book or film in front of the genre’s most dedicated audience? Ginger Nuts of Horror is one of Europe’s largest independent horror review websites, with over 30 contributors publishing horror book reviews and horror movie reviews almost every single day.

We offer far more than reviews. Authors, filmmakers and publishers can promote their work through in-depth horror book reviews, horror film reviews, comic and video game coverage, news features, and our popular author and director interviews like Five Minutes With. Our guest feature series, The Horror of My Life, Childhood Fears, The ? That Made Me and more, let creators tell their story while promoting their latest release.

Every feature is built to sell your work. We include backlinks to your website or Amazon author page, a full synopsis, and a universal purchasing link that sends readers straight to their local store. Add a large, engaged social following and an 18-year archive of trusted horror coverage, and you have a platform genuinely built to grow your readership.

Whether you’re an established author, an indie filmmaker, or a debut voice in indie horror, there’s a way for us to help you reach more fans. Explore our horror book reviews and horror movie reviews, then get your horror book or film featured today.