Rikki Ducornet Books in Order

Charlotte is born with a furry, hare-shaped birthmark that her village interprets as a sign of evil. Surrounded by religious fear and coercive authority, she becomes the focus of a struggle over innocence, power, and possession.

A botanist seeks an ideal life in the Amazon while the son he left behind grows up consumed by resentment. Their contrasting paths lead from private estrangement toward the destructive politics of Nazi-occupied France.

This poetry collection draws on the medieval bestiary to mingle real and imaginary animals. Dreamlike encounters, obsessive images, and sudden violence connect its creatures with a wider exploration of imagination and apocalyptic possibility.

After waking from a sleep that began in childhood and lasted decades, Nicolas tries to reconstruct his past. At a secluded French spa, a psychoanalyst helps him uncover memories whose pleasures conceal a disturbing history of violence.

Memory recounts the fate of her sister Etheria, whose father trades her for a precious piece of jade. Moving between Victorian Oxford and Egypt, the story examines desire, domination, and the power exercised through language.

Letters from an imaginary Caribbean island recount its strange natural history and troubled past. At their center is Phosphor, a physically deformed seventeenth-century inventor and artist whose pursuit of beauty unfolds amid religious persecution and exploitation.

These twelve stories move across cultures and centuries to examine the unsettling possibilities of desire. Encounters involving lovers, religious figures, and scholars reveal passion as a source of betrayal, transformation, fear, and moments of transcendence.

During the French Revolution, a fan-maker faces trial over her friendship and collaboration with the imprisoned Marquis de Sade. Her defense of provocative art and a book exposing colonial atrocities becomes a confrontation with a court determined to punish them.

These essays explore unusual and unsettling works of literature, art, and film through the image of a cabinet of wonders. Ducornet considers how excess, anomaly, and imaginative encounters with otherness can enlarge perceptions of the world.

In 1950s Cairo, thirteen-year-old Elizabeth watches her parents drift into separate worlds. A perfumer’s knowledge of ancient scents offers her a new fascination as she tries to understand her changing family and her place within it.

Ducornet gathers modern fables whose characters move through strange and unpredictable situations. Accompanied by T. Motley’s illustrations, these short stories combine the familiar with the fantastic, inviting readers into worlds that resist ordinary expectations.

A psychoanalyst abuses his authority through affairs with patients and strangers, trying to keep each part of his life separate. His attempts at control echo his collection of miniature sculptures, revealing a mind increasingly trapped by its own compulsions.

A boy surviving unnoticed on a university campus grows into a life of theft and concealment. When Billy takes him in and he becomes fascinated by Asthma, the possibility of belonging brings new dangers and misplaced attachments.

Astronaut Quiver escapes the monotony of asteroid mining through virtual encounters with a mysterious woman. When an accident disrupts their cargo mission, she and her robot companion Mic abandon routine and head toward the planet Trafik.

A man taking a walk is arrested by the robot Plotinus and imprisoned for his ties to a disappearing world. Memories, forbidden activities, mysterious messages, and uncertain visitors complicate his isolation as reality becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from hallucination.

Sixty brief tales range across strange histories and imagined worlds, linking desire with cruelty, wonder, and obsession. Alchemy, unfamiliar cultures, and uncanny transformations appear in this expanded collection, which incorporates the original Butcher’s Tales alongside additional stories.

Ducornet explores connections among dreams, desire, art, mythology, and violence in this essay collection. Reflections on writers, symbolic objects, and historical cruelty examine the imagination’s capacity to transform experience and challenge the exercise of power.